CFP ECAS 2023 – Cologne, 31 mai-03 juin – panel réécritures génériques en littérature anglophone

La prochaine conférence européenne d’Études Africaines ECAS 2023 qui se tiendra à Cologne (Allemagne) du 31/05 au 03/06 2023 et portant sur les Futurs africains comptera plusieurs panels portant sur la littérature.

Parmi eux, permettez-nous de vous signaler le panel  intitulé Bad genre: “counter literature”, generic rewritings and imagining African futures (Lang08) dont vous trouverez le résumé (en anglais) ci-dessous et pour lequel nous serions ravies de recevoir vos propositions de communications. Les propositions doivent obligatoirement être déposées en ligne : https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/ecas2023/p/12440 (un onglet figure en bas de page pour déposer votre résumé, de 250 mots maximum).
NB : la langue de présentation recommandée pour le panel est l’anglais du fait de notre objet d’études.

L’appel à communication pour participer aux différents panels est ouvert jusqu’au 23 janvier 2023 (https://ecasconference.org/2023/cfp)

Short abstract:

This panel will offer compared analyses of rewritings and inventions of supposedly minor genres in the literature in English from several African countries and how they may be seen as coming together to delineate possible African futures.

 

Long abstract:

In recent years, the literary scene in several African countries has seen science fiction, a prospective genre, flourish, together with many avatars–speculative fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, dystopias… Once considered more minor genres, it seems that those instances of what Bernard Mouralis calls “counter-literature” enable writers to imagine African futures, as well as to explore the ways in which, particularly at the time of ecological crises, local systems may be “imbricated in global ones” (Heise). Indeed, the resurgence of such genres and their local developments–if one thinks of Mohale Mashigo and Nnedi Okorafor’s rejection of Afrofuturism in favour of a more African brand of the genre–would deserve to be compared with a simultaneous rewriting of other minor genres like the gothic or crime fiction in South Africa, or the Bildungsroman in Nigeria. Already at the crossroads between a Western heritage and more local traditions, at a time besides when authors writing in English also see their works acquire a more transnational nature with the internet, social networks and the larger and more instantaneous dissemination they allow compared to more traditional means of publishing, those older genres are also twisted and rewritten both to explore the tensions that remain beneath the (increasingly cracked) surface veneer of success in the no longer so new South African democracy or the West African petro-culture, and imagine the (possibly rather bleak) future of these countries. These genres from the past and more modern ones seem to come together to imagine possible African futures.

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