Call For Papers
African Literatures Association Annual Meeting
University of Delaware
June 2-4, 2027
Remembering Queer African Lives: Living Archives, Contested Pasts, and Possible Futures Sponsored by the Queer African Studies Caucus of the African Literature Association (QASALA)
Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s notable remark that “in Africa, when an old man dies, a library burns down” presents human lives as repositories of collective knowledge. Yet living libraries are neither neutral nor complete. Memories may be selective, reconciled by the present, reshaped through language, or constrained by what individuals and communities can safely acknowledge. In contexts where queerness is widely dismissed as ‘un-African,’ what happens to memories of same-sex desires, nonnormative intimacies, and gender variance? Are they preserved, coded, translated, transformed, silenced, or erased?
This panel seeks papers that examine how queer African lives, memories, and forms of knowledge, across Africa, have been preserved, transmitted, represented, or concealed across time. QASALA invites contributors to consider memoirs, oral histories, lived experiences, literary texts, films, performances, visual arts, and other cultural forms as possible archives of queer African existence. Papers may also recover the contributions of pioneering scholars, writers, artists, activists, and cultural workers whose work has shaped queer African studies but may remain overlooked within established intellectual and institutional histories. Rather than approaching the archive as a static or exclusively institutional repository, the panel asks how people, communities, languages, places, and cultural works can function as living and contested archives.
Engaging ALA’s conference theme, “Archives of the Past, Present, and Future of African Literatures,” this panel asks: What constitutes a queer African archive, and who holds the authority to create, preserve, interpret, or participate in it? How do memory, silence, language, place, and the persistent characterization of queerness as ‘un-African’shape what can be remembered and recognized as historical knowledge? Whose lives and contributions enter these archives, whose remain excluded, and how might scholars approach memories that are selective, reconciled, or contested? Finally, what futures await queer African archives, and how might they become more inclusive, accessible, and attentive to the communities whose histories they preserve? In keeping with QASALA’s mission, the panel aims to advance interdisciplinary inquiry into queer African lives and cultural production while expanding the methods, materials, and voices recognized within African literary studies.
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words and brief bios of not more than 100 words by 15 Oct 2026 queerafricanstudiesala@gmail.com.