Short Abstract

This panel examines language as a gendered, culturally embedded, and political prism through which African artists, activists, and everyday practitioners forge new modes of belonging and advocacy, from commemorative protest idioms to literacy, multilingualism, and digital activism.

Long Abstract

Language is the medium through which people make sense of the world, express identity, negotiate relationships, advocate for change, and claim access to resources and influence, sometimes at others' expense. Shaped by culture-specific idioms and driven by personal need and political agenda, language is the mundane material through which new, often gendered, practices of belonging and advocacy are generated, especially on a continent where more than 2,000 languages divide and unite populations.

Working across disciplines and methodologies, this panel brings together literary, linguistic, and historical approaches to study language as a creatively applied, culturally informed, and often political and gendered prism through which African artists, activists, and everyday practitioners establish new modes of belonging and advocacy. We invite papers that, for example, examine how commemorative languages, such as the rallying cry "Amandla," inspire present-day activism and place its practitioners within a lineage of political dissent; how access to literacy reshapes women's economic opportunities, labor, and self-understanding, as among women navigating tourism-sector work; or how multilingualism and intertextuality furnish artists with gendered registers of belonging across cultural and creative landscapes.

The panel thus contributes to the objectives of the conference by asking how voices across the African continent, literally and figuratively, are invested in particular historical and cultural environments; how they claim gendered forms of agency and power, sometimes exacerbating existing social fault lines; and how the knowledge they produce shifts the porous boundaries between art and activism, academic and everyday life.

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