Short Abstract

African stories once moved by orality and migration. Today, literature, film, music, podcasting, etc have accelerated movements of African stories across boundaries. Thus we ask: in what ways do African stories travel across these boundaries and what new refractions emerge with these crossings?

Long Abstract

In Narratives Crossing Boundaries, Friedmann (2023) examines how stories travel and transform across media, disciplines, and cultural contexts. Drawing on fields such as game studies and media studies, the volume shows how narratives shape human behaviour. This panel adopts a similarly interdisciplinary approach to consider how African stories circulate across genres, periods, cultures, geographies, media, and social worlds. It asks what defines an African story, how such stories have travelled over time, and how movement within and beyond the continent reshapes their meanings and forms. What new refractions emerge when African stories cross boundaries? How does a folk character change when it moves from one culture to another? What happens, for example, when a folktale leaves the Igbo context in Nigeria and appears within a Bantu context in Kenya? What is altered, and what remains recognisable, when stories are adapted into new media forms? How, for instance, is the Apeth of South Sudan rendered recognisable or unfamiliar in Remi Weekes’ His House (2020)? How is West Africa’s Mami Water refracted in creative works across the continent and the African diaspora? The panel invites contributions from scholars and practitioners working on African narratives within Africa and beyond. It seeks to understand how and why stories shift as they cross generational, geographical, media, cultural, ethnic, religious, and social boundaries, with particular attention to the ways African stories are transformed while in motion.

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