Conference Dates - November 20th to 23rd 2025

Location - San Francisco, California - The InterContinental San Francisco Hotel - U.S.A.

Topic - Reclaiming History: Trauma, Memory and Resilience in the Narratives from Africa

Deadline for Abstract/Proposal Submission - Thursday, May 15th 2025

Overview - 

We invite proposals for papers dealing with African narratives, mainly East African, that discuss the representations of African experiences of struggle with tyrannical colonial powers, slavery, civil wars, migration, as well as the immigrant experience in the host country after displacement from the native place. This session encourages proposals primarily on the works of the 2021 Nobel-winning Zanzibari-British writer Abdulrazak Gurnah. However, papers on the comparative study of Gurnah's works with other African writers are also welcomed.

Description - 

While on the one hand, Africa bears a legacy of slavery which finds its roots in the pre-colonial era (and later becomes a tool used for the exploitation of the natives by the colonizers), on the other hand, Africa's colonial history which saw the reign of Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands, marks it as a site of memory and trauma. Our primary concern here is East Africa and the German Empire, which find their way into Gurnah's novels. Gurnah's works have been noteworthy contributions to understanding the experiences of the people who were at the bottom of the power structure. Gurnah is primarily known "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents" (The Swedish Academy). In his answer to a question about his motivation for writing, he answers, "My interest was not to write about the war or the ugliness of colonialism. Instead I want to make sure the context in which war and colonialism happened is understood. And that the people in that context were people with entire existences. I want to show how people who are wounded by the war and by life itself cope in these circumstances" ("Africa in Words"). While doing this, he touches on different facets of the human experiences.

We look forward to proposals which will provide an analysis of the works of Gurnah (and other African writers dealing with similar themes) by using different theoretical frameworks relating to the themes mentioned below.

Topics of interest for this panel include but are not limited to:

--- Body as a repository of memory and trauma
--- The Zanzibar Revolution and the subsequent mass exodus
--- Survival, resilience and recovery
--- Colonialism and the German Empire
--- Intergenerational trauma
--- Migration and displacement
--- Immigrant experience and asylum-seeking
--- Multidirectional Memory
--- Reclamation of history and finding closure
--- African Culture and sexuality
--- Memory and Trauma
--- Palimpsestic memory and narrative techniques
--- Cultural memory and crises of belonging
--- Migration and unhomeliness
--- Violence, Vulnerability and War Trauma
--- Resistance against colonial empire
--- Agential politics of history, memory and identity formation

For any queries, please feel free to reach out to Chitra Kumari at - chitra_k@hs.iitr.ac.in. 

Submit your abstract & proposal at this link - https://pamla.ballastacademic.com

Visit the conference webpage for more info - https://www.pamla.org/pamla2025/ 

Please Note - This conference will be a fully in-person meeting, and thus no online sessions will be possible. To submit your proposal, please upload your abstract and contact information to the submission site, which can be found at the link above. You'll be asked to submit a short abstract of 50 words and a proposal of 250 to 300 words. All proposals will receive a reply. Thank you in advance, and we hope to see you at the conference in San Francisco.