New Horizons in Queer African Literature, Film, and Culture
Sponsored by the Queer African Studies Caucus of the ALA (QASALA)
This session develops the 2026 ALA conference theme on “New Horizons” by taking specific stock of queer developments in African literature and expressive cultures in the last half century (or earlier), as well as rethinking and revaluating new queer horizons already being mapped out by African literature, film, and attendant scholarship. Acknowledging, as the conference theme does, that African literature is both “vast and varied, rural and urban, continental and diasporic, oral and written, analogue and digital,” we seek papers that address how queerness is interwoven through these various modes and spaces (geopolitical, geographical, discursive, generic, digital, others) into Africa and its literatures, or how queer African literature and film may always already constitute distinct flows of queer reworlding in Africa and its diaspora that resist Western forms of queer existence and interpretation. How does queer African literature, film, and other media reshape the contours of identity, language, culture, translation, migration, genre, center-periphery relations, or methodological/scholarly approaches? This is one of two sessions sponsored by the Caucus with a guaranteed slot on the ALA conference program. Please send titles, abstracts up to 250 words, and brief bios (no CVs) by 20 Dec 2025, or any inquiries, to queerafricanstudiesala@gmail.com