African Literature Association 33rd Annual Convention
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The formal panel sessions, which began at 8 a.m. the following morning, truly reflected the conference’s afore-mentioned theme. Although a few panels were dedicated to issues beyond that immediate topic, most participants presented papers on representations of immigration, identity formation, and contemporary enunciations of citizenship and belonging, or on the production, circulation and reception of African literatures. The dominant languages of the conference were French and English. But there were two panels, one on ‘Afro-Caribbean Film and Literature’ and the other on ‘Afro-Hispanic Identities,’ which were held in Spanish and Portuguese.
In terms of regionalisms, the convened sessions reflected a variety of terrains: the theme of immigration was invariably often coupled to examinations of tensions and overlaps between older and newer patterns of migrations and their effects on literary production. Thus, while some papers in line with Cheney-Coker’s talk, attending to historical conjunctions between Africa and European capitalism, addressed the trans-Atlantic traffic in Africans and its repercussions, most papers dealt with the representation of inner African migrations, or the Diaspora aesthetics of emerging writers such as Segun Afolabi and Doreen Baingana. There were panels devoted exclusively to the Caribbean and to East, West, North and South or Southern Africa. One advantage of these ‘area studies’ panels was that the focus on specific regions, or countries, allowed for detailed conversations at the end of presentations. This was the case, for example, with the ‘Voices from East Africa’ session. Although here, the discussion focussed almost exclusively on one paper to the detriment of the two interesting papers on Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Wizard of the Crow. It really struck me, here, that it might have helped if the moderator was not on the panel himself. The ALA may very well want to consider having persons, independent of the panel members, act as chairs.
As a first time visitor to the conference, I was a little bit surprised to notice a strong cleavage into Anglophone and Francophone panels. Although there were a number of audience crossovers, since multilingual participants went to both French and English language panels, the conference remained largely divided along linguistic lines. I found this regrettable, since some of the Anglophone and Francophone sessions could have been brought into fruitful dialogue if the speakers had been mixed: it would have been interesting to know, for example, how globalization—or mondialisation—affects African cultural production along language divides. This omission struck me forcefully when I visited Cilas Kemedjio’s panel ‘Conscience éthique, conscience nationale, et conscience mondiale.’ All three panellists presented articulate analysis of cultural traffic between France and writers and filmmakers from its African ex-colonies. It would have been interesting to have some of these presentations in dialogue with other papers on Anglophone African literatures.
Such exchange took place productively in the session on ‘Genocide Narratives,’ in which presenters spoke about the diverse literary and cinematic responses to the Rwandan genocide across language boundaries. The exchange between Joya Uraizee, Michèle Vialet and Sadibou Sow about the big screen productions of the genocide, and the West African narratives of it, highlighted the theme of distinct cultures of circulation and the sometimes overlapping, but often discreet, mechanisms of production and spheres of consumption of narratives about historical events.
Conference Notes page 3 (continues) >>