Africa and the World: Literature, Politics, and Global Geographies

The theme chosen for the June 14-17, 2017 conference at Yale 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?