Where: Yale University, New Haven

When: June 14th - June 17th 2017

This year’s ALA conference seeks to engage with and interrogate recent shifts in critical and theoretical frameworks from regional, national, and “postcolonial” models towards “world literature” as a framework for understanding the literatures of the Global South. How useful is the category of world literature in our ongoing contestation of Eurocentrism in the interpretation of African literatures and cultures? What possibilities are offered by African literatures and cultures for (re)imagining the world, including the “world” posited by recent theorizations?

Papers, pre-constituted panels, seminars, and roundtables will be in the following areas, and on other topics relating to ALA members’ research, and caucus interests:

• African literatures, world literatures
• Audiences and readerships
• Conflict and literature
• Diasporic and transnational connections
• Digital and social media
• Global aftermaths of slavery
• Popular arts
• Publishing in Africa
• Urbanism and literature

Kwani’s Managing Editor Billy Kahora will chair a panel on ‘The Past and Future in East African Literature’

Online registration is now closed. On-site registration will be available at the conference (for non-presenters only) at the Afro-American Cultural Center, 211 Park Street, New Haven.