This proposed panel for the November 2026 Tunisian Association for English Language Studies International Conference | Home-Making: Reinventing Home in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures invites papers that examine Black and African fatherhood as a site of un-homing, home-making, and reinvention across Anglophone literatures and cultures. While scholarship on families has often centered mothers and children, fathers remain understudied as agents of domestic life, memory work, and cultural transmission. This panel asks: How do Black and African fathers across the continent and diaspora imagine, build, and sustain home under conditions of enslavement, displacement, invasion, colonialism, anti-Blackness, and historical rupture?

For Black and African fathers, the physical home has rarely been a site of freedom or safety. This panel therefore attends to physical as well as non-normative and non-physical ways of homemaking: home as memory, as letter, as oral tradition, as care, as return. Drawing on Homi Bhabha's concept of the "unhomely," the panel undersatnds the Black father's home as always unsettled, always negotiated, always made again. And yet in still African and diasporic fathers' efforts to make hom for their kin persists. This panel attends to both the violence that has targeted African and Black fathers and the creative, resilient ways they continue to reinvent home.

I invite papers that engage with African and Black diasporic fatherhood across any Anglophone context: the African continent, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Caribbean, and Europe. Interdisciplinary approaches are welcome, including literary studies, cultural studies, film studies, archival studies, and critical race theory.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• African fathers and homemaking in precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial literature

• Black fathers, homemaking, and the legacy of slavery

• Apartheid pass laws and the separation of African fathers from their families

• African fathers in the child welfare systems of North America and Europe

• Epistolary fatherhood: letters, journals, and long distance parenting across Africa and diaspora

• Black queer fathers and non-normative home-making

• The griot tradition and fatherhood as memory keeping

• African fathers and cultural inheritance: what is passed down and what is lost

• Returning fathers: diaspora, Africa, and the search for home

• Black fatherhood and incarceration in South Africa, the US, and the UK

• Fictive kinship and community fathering across African and diasporic contexts

• African fathers and home in film: ex. Ousmane Sembène

Please send a 300 word abstract to Dr. Nicole R. Diop at nicole.richards@csus.edu by Sunday June 27, 2026. Please put Black Fathers and Homemaking Panel in the subject header 

Thank you!