Victoria Ketz (La Salle University)

Cris(tina) Robu (Davidson College)

Simona Wright (The College of New Jersey)

This session explores the intersections of language, memory, and identity in African and African diasporic literature, media, and cultural production. Across the African continent and its diasporas, language functions not only as a means of communication but also as a repository of history, cultural memory, resistance, and self-definition. Colonialism, migration, globalization, and nationalism have shaped linguistic practices in complex ways, producing multilingual and hybrid cultural landscapes that continue to influence literary and artistic expression.

We invite papers examining how African writers, filmmakers, artists, and cultural producers engage with questions of language and memory in relation to identity formation. Topics may include multilingualism, oral traditions, translation, indigenous language preservation, code-switching, colonial languages, linguistic resistance, or the politics of language in education and public life. How do literary and visual texts preserve collective memory through language? In what ways do language practices shape understandings of ethnicity, nationhood, gender, migration, and diaspora?

This session also welcomes discussions of archives, storytelling, performance, music, and digital media as spaces where memory and identity are negotiated across generations and geographic boundaries. Papers may address the role of oral history and storytelling traditions, the circulation of African languages in global media, or the tensions between local linguistic identities and transnational cultural flows.

Potential subjects include novels, poetry, film, music, theater, social media, and visual cultures from across Africa and the African diaspora. Interdisciplinary and comparative approaches drawing from literary studies, linguistics, anthropology, media studies, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies are especially encouraged.

By foregrounding language as a living archive of memory and identity, this session seeks to foster conversations about cultural continuity, historical recovery, and the evolving meanings of African identities in local and global contexts.

This session explores the intersections of language, memory, and identity in African and African diasporic literature, media, and cultural production. We invite papers examining how African writers, filmmakers, artists, and cultural producers engage with questions of language and memory in relation to identity formation. Topics may include multilingualism, oral traditions, translation, indigenous language preservation, code-switching, colonial languages, linguistic resistance, or the politics of language in education and public life.