Victoria Ketz (La Salle University)
Cris(tina) Robu (Davidson College)
Simona Wright (The College of New Jersey)
This board-sponsored session seeks to explore representations of contemporary and ultra-contemporary African cultures and the ways in which they confront, resist, and deconstruct forms of neocolonial cultural appropriation. Attentive to the entanglements of culture, history, and memory, this panel examines how African artists, writers, and thinkers re-fashion inherited narratives and reclaim modes of self-representation in the face of ongoing epistemic and cultural extraction.
We invite contributions that interrogate how cultural production across the continent and its diasporas engages with, reworks, and subverts neocolonial dynamics. We are particularly interested in explorations of these dynamics across a wide range of forms and genres, from autofiction and autotheory to science fiction, speculative fiction, and critical theory. We especially welcome work that foregrounds African and diasporic perspectives, emphasizing strategies of refusal, reinvention, and critical reappropriation. Interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged, including but not limited to literary studies, visual culture, film and media studies, performance studies, anthropology, and cultural theory.