L’association ALA – African Literature Association – tiendra son congrès annuel à l’Université de Bayreuth du 3 au 6 juin 2015 sur le thème “African Futures and Beyond. Visions in Transition”.
L’appel à communications, l’appel à panels et les informations pratiques sont consultables sur le site du congrès : http://www.ala2015.com/#/home/
Call for Papers/Call for Panels
Colonial fantasies have imagined the African continent as the incarnation of the past, banning it into a “waiting room of history” (Chakrabarty) where it was doomed to eternally lag behind (Western) futures. Those fantasies are conceptualizations that veil other realities and changes that have always been going on – often being silenced, loudly ignored and violently repressed. Cultural and political movements on the African continent and its diasporas have found varying ways to cope with and resist these colonialist fantasies, imagining Black futures of national as well as global agendas. Increasingly, Black visions of the future have nourished and rewritten Western conceptualizations of Africa as well as of Blackness. Moreover, they keep changing the African continent, its diasporas, as well as the rest of the world.
Political changes such as the upheavals of the student protests, e.g. in Senegal, Burkina, Maghreb, the end of apartheid, radical changes, e.g., in Rwanda, and the Arab revolution, generate new discourses and cultural changes. Steadily increasing economic growth, growing cooperation with the Asian network, as well as the rise of new middle classes in many countries—open unexpected perspectives. New approaches in literature and the arts create new intertextualities and epistemologies that also welcome interdisciplinary conversations and connections to enrich ways of understanding the world in the humanities. In recent years, emerging technologies and the digitization of the world keep transgressing conventional patterns of communication. In all, global entanglements and interactions are revolutionized, inviting us into a new age.
Literature and other cultural means of expression (film, fine arts, performing arts, internet etc.) offer a space that allows us to enter futures thus generated. These conceptualizations of future permit us to imagine the world differently, to intervene in memories and mold the present. In doing so, fiction in general and AfroFiction in particular conceptualizes futures via narration in order to conjure the futures of our common world in terms of new epistemologies.
Possible thematic clusters could be
• Conceptualization of future in literature/film/social media
• Visions of the Future in Africa, its Diasporas and beyond
• Entangled Futures: Africa/n Diasporas and Europe/North America
• Africa/Asia–Africa/Americas: a comparative approach of
conceptualizations of future
• Genres for/of the future (e.g. Science Fiction, Néo-polar)
• The future of gender and sexuality/ queer futurities
• The future of literary studies in the 21st century
• Utopias, dystopias
• Afrofuturism
• Petro-culture and the energies of modernity: mining and resource
conflicts
• The futures of environmental representation and environmental
justice: environmentalisms, climate change adaptation and
migrations of disease across species and nations
• Environmental humanities / risk/ apocalypse
• Social models
• Rebellions/revolutions – re-loaded/renewed
• Arab Spring /African Spring
• Social media and genre-crossing: African(-Diasporic) literatures
and/in the Digital Age
• Preemptive literature
• Littérature d’urgence
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Maëline Le Lay (28 septembre 2014). Congrès de l’African Literature Association à Bayreuth en juin 2015. Carnets de littératures africaines. Consulté le 18 février 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/b9k4