Call for Papers
African Literature Association Conference
University of Delaware
June 2-4, 2027
Queer Translation(s) in/of African Literature & Culture
Sponsored by the ALA Queer African Studies and Translation Caucuses
The Queer African Studies Caucus (QASALA) and the Translation Caucus (TRACALA) of the African Literature Association seek papers for a guaranteed panel that examine critically the theory and/or practice of queer translation studies in relation to African literature and culture, broadly conceived, to include literary, expressive, cultural, and digital texts from the continent or from across the African diaspora, as well as translative work across and/or between African and colonial languages. Papers may consider, for example, how the essential dissidence of translation as a relational, yet disruptive, transgressive, and possibly queer space between source and translated text can be explored further when we are especially attentive to the gender and sexual politics of translation when working with African literary and cultural texts. How does one work with the term queer, which has its origins in Western Anglophone cultures, when translating African texts? What translation issues arise when we work with African-based texts where terms for same-sex desires and sexual practices may not be inscribed discursively in indigenous African languages, or, if they are, how is translation “troubled,” given the emergence of such terms under a different set of material, cultural, and historical conditions? How do racial and cultural differences impede the straightforward translation of dissident gender and desire in African literary and cultural texts? How might the dialogical processes of interlinguistic transfer and cultural exchange function as sites of social change by challenging the notion, evident in some forms of African cultural nationalism, that dissident forms of gender-identification and sexuality inscribed in African texts are foreign to African identities and cultures? How do the variant borrowings, reappropriations, and retoolings of queerness by African writers, filmmakers, artists, activists, and cultural workers function as translations, adapted to the priorities of local cultures, that enable new flows of queer reworlding in Africa and its diaspora rather than being mere repetitions of Western forms of queer existence and resistance?
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words and brief bios of not more than 100 words by 15 Oct 2026 to dmy1@nyu.edu and queerafricanstudiesala@gmail.com