ALA Annual conference: "Ecologies of Transition: Spaces and Mobilities in African Literatures and Cultures"
This conference, marking the 50th anniversary of the formation of the African Literature Association (ALA), explores the ways in which African writers reconceive movement and place. Often, narratives about Africans on the move, particularly migrant Africans, reflect a tension between motion and stasis. Such tensions highlight the often-unsettling narrative transitions that characterize recent poetry, fiction, drama, and non-fiction from Africa and the diaspora. While narratives like NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names depict the exigencies of forced removal, others, like Fatou Diome’s Belly of the Atlantic describe identities and situations in flux.