Across the African continent and its global diasporas, trauma reverberates through histories of slavery, colonialism, racial capitalism, gendered violence, war, migration, and displacement. However, African and Afrodiasporic writers and artists have not only transformed experiences of pain into sites of creativity, survival, and healing but also reflected in their works the use of African approaches to restoration. This edited volume seeks to explore the ways in which trauma is reconstituted, managed, borne, and cured in African and Afrodiasporic literature and cultural expressions. While Western trauma theory has shaped much critical discourse, its Eurocentric frameworks often fail to account for African perspectives of collective, spiritual, and culturally embedded understandings of suffering and recovery.

With the foregoing, this project invites contributors to interrogate, extend, and reimagine trauma studies through African and diasporic epistemologies, aesthetics, and histories as presented in literary works. We seek papers that may challenge Eurocentric models of trauma or foreground African epistemologies of healing, resilience, restoration, cultural coping mechanisms, and memory—while attending to the intersections of history, identity, and aesthetics in the narration of pain and recovery. While essays must center on creative works (except thematic area 1, where we highly encourage submissions from scholars in Trauma Studies), we welcome interdisciplinary approaches and encourage analyses that move beyond pathology to consider resilience as well as individual and/or communal repair.

Possible Thematic Areas

1. Re-theorizing Trauma: Trauma in African and Afrodiasporic Contexts

• Indigenous, decolonial, or Afrocentric epistemologies of trauma and healing
• Limitations of Western trauma theory (e.g., Caruth, LaCapra) in African/Afrodiasporic settings
• Recovering from or coping with intergenerational trauma
• Oral traditions, spirituality, and ritual as frameworks for understanding trauma in African/Afrodiasporic contexts
•  Decolonizing trauma studies through literary and cultural analysis
• Reclaiming joy and beauty as decolonial healing strategies

2. Literary presentations of Recovery, Historical Traumas, Collective Memory, and Contemporary Traumas

• Surviving the foundational traumas of slavery, colonialism, and the Middle Passage
• Recovery from foundational traumas to confront new and emerging ones: apartheid, genocide (e.g., Rwanda), civil conflicts, sexual violence, domestic trauma, war-time gendered experiences, LGBTQ+ experiences, etc.
• The body as site of both trauma and resistance
• Cultural storytelling, performance, music, and visual art as modes of witnessing and healing

3. Literary Treatments of Migration, Exile, and Displacement

• Recovery from traumas caused by forced migration and diasporic conditions
• The dilemmas of home, belonging, and fractured identities

4. Narrativizing Resistance, Restoration, Resilience, and Reclamation

• Literary presentations of cultural resilience, communal life/community, ritual, and everyday survival as reparative acts
• Community healing, resilience, and restorative justice in literature
• Reimagining post-traumatic futures through Afrofuturism and speculative fiction
• The aesthetics of hope and repair in literature

Submission Guidelines

• Abstracts: 300–400 words outlining the proposed chapter, including objectives, theoretical framework, and contribution to the volume’s theme. Other than works that will contribute to thematic area 1, all other woks must specify the African or Afrodiasporic texts that will be examined.
  Please send your abstract to: paul.mukundi@morgan.edu and copy to: traci.williams@morgan.edu
• Biographical note: 100–200 words including author’s title and institutional affiliation (if any) and major/relevant publication/s.
• Full chapters: 5,000–6,000 words (including references), formatted in MLA 9th edition style. Endnotes should be used in lieu of footnotes.

Timeline

• Abstract deadline: February 28, 2026
• Notification of (abstract) acceptance: March 15, 2026
• Full chapter submission: June 30, 2026
• Peer review feedback: November 15, 2026
• Revised chapters due: December 15, 2026
• Expected publication: Tentative Fall 2027