CFP: African Street Literatures
(abstracts deadline 15 Dec, 2017)
English Studies in Africa that will focus on African street
literature. By this, the editors mean literature that emerges
and is shaped by the specific factors determining everyday
life in sub-Saharan Africa’s megacities, that is to say,
literature that largely exists beyond the reach of the
infrastructures of global literature and the academic
establishment in the global north. Such scholarship about
African literature is largely focused on the African novel, a
genre and form that enjoys global circulation but which is
less relevant in Africa itself where new and emergent
forms of literary expression dominate cultural circuits and
flows. A key premise behind this special issue is that these
emergent forms, as cultural archives of everyday life in the
African city, call for a literary mapping and analysis that
they have not yet received. This is important since the
intensification of social, political, economic, health and
environmental precariousness, alongside uneven spurts
of economic growth, rapid urbanisation, unprecedented
access to technology and global connectivity, and a
correlated surge in cultural and aesthetic expression,
make African cities concentrated locations of vulnerable
modernity. The African city and its writing are therefore
vital sites to investigate the relationship between literary
form and modernity at its most pressured and
unpredictable.We invite submission of abstracts for
papers focusing on:
selection of these ephemeral materials.
We invite scholars to send abstracts of no more than 300 words
to ashleigh.harris@engelska.uu.se and
nicklas.hallen@engelska.uu.se
by no later than 15 December 2017.