ACLA Virtual Conference 2025: Illegibility and Aesthetic Form in the African Diasporas of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans
This seminar invites submissions that explore intentional illegibilites deployed in literary and visual forms in the African diasporas of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Despite their intertwined histories of slavery and colonialism, these regions have typically been understood as hermetically sealed off from one another in the humanities. The fields of literary studies and visual culture, however, illustrate how racialized subjects across these aqueous geographies have relied on shared strategies of opacity and obfuscation, leveraging forms such as the photograph and the novel whose histories and development were imbricated in colonial processes.