Comparative Literature / American/Diaspora

Hybrid: The session will be held in-person but a few remote presentations may be included.

E. Kalu Amah (University of Tulsa)

Before the inaugural moment of Modern African literature with the publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in 1958, African American literature had become controversial, starting from the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s with such writers as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Zora Neale Hurston, among others. Towards the 1940s and 50s, the United States’s Jim Crow segregation raised political, racial, and economic tensions, fostering events leading to the civil rights movement and the Civil Rights Act of 1964; these events exponentially influenced the literature of Black American authors such as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, among others. It was around this period that African nations were ending their political and cultural union with colonial powers. Thus, in many different ways, Black literature across these continents shared common themes and topics, including racism, colonialism, underrepresentation, disillusionment, migration, communism, capitalism, double consciousness, segregation, and economic recession. For example, the civil rights movement in the United States parallels the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, both in terms of objectives and period. Therefore, this panel is interested in new perspectives from essays that explore cross-cultural, cross-continental, and cross-national topics in the literature of African and African American authors written or set in the twentieth century.

Black literatures of African and African American authors set in the twentieth century share cross-cultural realities. These continental literatures have explored topics such as segregation, colonialism, post-colonial disillusionment, civil and political underrepresentation, migration, economic recession, capitalism, racism, double consciousness, and others. This panel seeks essays that explore, using a comparative lens, a new perspective of the connections between these two continental Black authors, cultures, and topics.