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- Convenors:
-
Obi Nwakanma
(University of Central Florida)
Maik Nwosu (University of Denver)
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- Location:
- B1 0.03
- Sessions:
- Friday 19 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
From the end of the last century, a stream of African writers and artists relocated from an African homeland, to new sites of endeavor especially in the United States and Europe. This panel will examine the conjunctions between home and exile and the imagining of a new diaspora
Long Abstract:
A new generation of writers and artists from Africa, some of who now ply their trade in Europe and America, and various other places in the world complicate the idea of an African Diaspora. Frequently, perhaps because of the ways in which writing and other artistic endeavors mark and inflect identity, and the terms by which we construct its discourse, a new problem arises about the relationship between the homeland and the imagination. Is African writing produced by a contemporary generation born outside of Africa, or who have relocated, and established new homes outside of Africa, still to be considered "African literature" or "African art"? How do we for instance, position the works of African writers and artists who reside, and embrace their new homes, and imagine home in a cosmopolitan and transcendent way? In short, how do these writers and artists inflect the new meaning of home, beyond the African homeland, and how does the imaginary, impact, reflect, and reconstitute a new sense of the Diaspora? What aspects of this new diaspora of Africans working and living, and creating out of their more immediate experience of the African homeland is reshaping and reconstituting, if ever, the meaning of the African diaspora as it ecounters more settled communities, and traditions of the African diaspora across the Black Atlantic? This panel proposes to bring together a body of ideas that re-theorizes the Black Diaspora as a fluid and continuous space with powerful implications for the emergence of a new global blackness.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 19 July, 2019, -Barbara Fraticelli (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
Paper short abstract:
A new generation of African born writers is finding a special place in the literary world. In Spain and Portugal, these authors claim for a new identity, between home, exile and the need for a mutual understanding across countries and continents.
Paper long abstract:
A new generation of writers, officially considered as members of the African Diaspora, create their works according to their own personal experience.
Authors from the Spanish speaking Equatorial Guinea, such as Trifonia Melibea Obono and Guillermina Mekuy Mba-Obono , as well as from the Portuguese speaking Cape Verde and Angola, such as Joaquim Arena and Kalaf Epalanga, born and raised in the African continent, while living in Europe tend to recreate their own homelands in their writings, in a cathartic attempt to find their own selves.
Identity (Black, Queer, Catholic, etc.) turns into a major concern for those who embrace new homes in Lisbon, Madrid or Salamanca, but feel a strong and inevitable nostalgia for their native lands.
Rage, curiosity, fear, humour, confusion and, most of all, self consciousness, emerge from these narratives written in Spanish and Portuguese and meant to be read in Europe, rather than in Africa. But, despite the publishing houses' location, they are tantalizing both audiences, crossing mental and cultural borders through a common language.
Is Literature itself a new place of belonging for the Young African Diaspora?
Kevin Meehan (University of Central Florida)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores Armah's _Two Thousand Seasons_ as a neo-slave narrative that refuses forced migration at the point of origin and imagines return or homecoming as a strategy for re-asserting African sovereignty in an age of neoliberal economics and necropolitics.
Paper long abstract:
Armah's 1973 novel features a unique first-person plural voice that narrates from beginning to end. Set in an unnamed West African society where the so-called "people of the way" (206) have been infiltrated first by Islamic "predators" (203) and more recently by white "destroyers" from the Christian west (203), _Two Thousand Seasons_ charts an epic tale of collective decay and possible regeneration. While the people have departed from the collaborative, creative values of the way, and thereby left themselves open to a long period of domination and enslavement (the two thousand seasons of the title), the narrative voice in the novel issues a call for remembrance of the way and resistance to the forced migration of the Atlantic slave trade. My paper will explore the unique identity form projected by the collective narrator, and attempt to shed light on how Armah links cultural creativity with the political struggle to reclaim sovereignty in the wake of violent waves of imperialism and human trafficking. Functioning like a speculative neo-slave narrative, Armah's analysis of humans in relation to nature, commodities, and each other make this text urgently relevant in the present day. Along with my examination of the narrative voice, I will also draw on recent theories of necropolitics by Achille Mbembe and sovereignty by Giorgio Agamben to suggest why and how Armah's novel remains important for imagining and strategically reclaiming popular sovereignty over spaces and lives devastated by the continuing threat of a global neoliberal political economy.
Maik Nwosu (University of Denver)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how contemporary international migration within Africa as well as from Africa and the Caribbean is recharacterizing the idea of blackness or race in life and literature.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines how contemporary international migration within Africa as well as from Africa and the Caribbean is recharacterizing the idea of blackness or race in life and literature.
Obi Nwakanma (University of Central Florida)
Paper short abstract:
Uche Nduka presents an interesting problem for our understanding of contemporary African poetry. Born in Nigeria in 1963, Nduka, who has lived in “exile” in Europe, (Germany) and the United States was very active in the Lagos poetry revival of the late 1980s and early 1990s, until he left Nigeria following the fallouts of the June 12, 1993 elections. Often experimental and allusive, Nduka’s poetry indicates a break from the formalism of contemporary African poetry, and charts its own path, and reach for a coherent worldview situated in a very cosmopolitan poetic style. But within Nduka’s “cosmopolitanism” rests the thrust of a “Black Atlantic” poetic that questions, even as it amplifies our understanding of a new “black Diaspora.”
Paper long abstract:
Uche Nduka’s poetry, particularly in his collection Eel on the Reef has been described as “anti-narrative,” by the critic Sara Valentine. It positions Nduka as a remarkably inventive and experimental poet who packs more than clear-cut meaning in the dense, often elusive movements of his lines, much indeed like the “eel.” In this paper however, my contention is that Nduka presents more than an allusive, or even if deliberately elusive “anti-narrative” trope, but a rhizome of zeugmas that explore vast terrains of worldly, interstitial imagery, sometimes disconnected and fractured, but on the whole organic narrative staged in the tri-Atlantic space that connects his African world to its diasporas. I contend that the ruptures in the speech act are like the eel signifying Nduka’s slippery, disruptive stance, a subtle synecdochal move that hides as well as tells the story of new, diasporic migrancy exemplified by Nduka’s own location(s) within this “new Black Atlantic.”