At the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) conference at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, on 5^th-7^th March, 2019, the organiser Wendy Belcher will be hosting a seminar on African language literature.

Sixth Annual Seminar on African Language Literature

While African literature in colonial languages remains the subject of most Africanist scholarship in the United States and Europe, the vast majority of African texts are in African languages. Indeed, Africa is home to vibrant literary practices in indigenous languages that go almost entirely unstudied. Therefore, the annual ACLA seminar on African language literature provides a forum for scholarship on such texts from any period, and in forms traditional and popular, including film, television, music, art, online sites, genre novels like romances or thrillers, oral poetry, epic, and so on.

Images courtesy of ACLA

If you are interested in presenting a paper on African language literature, interpreted broadly, submit a title and brief abstract on the website.

Papers may introduce relatively unknown texts or suggest new theoretical approaches to the study of vernacular African literatures, which include, but are not limited to, literatures in Arabic, Berber, Coptic, Meroitic, Ge’ez, Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Kiswahili, Amharic, Oromo, Tigrinya, Somali, Malagasy, Shona, Zulu, and Xhosa, as well as Sheng, Nigerian Pidgin, and other creolized African languages.

To propose a paper, go to: https://www.acla.org/node/add/paper.

You must select Wendy Belcher’s seminar “Sixth Annual Seminar on African Language Literature” at the end of the form.

Paper submissions are currently open and close on 20th September.

The ACLA’s annual conferences have a distinctive structure in which papers are grouped into twelve-person seminars that meet two hours per day for three days of the conference to foster extended discussion. Some eight-person (or smaller) seminars meet just the first two days of the conference. This structure allows each participant to be a full member of one seminar, and to sample other seminars during the remaining time blocks.

Find out more on ACLA website, here.

Contact the Help Desk: help@mail.h-net.msu.edu.

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