In her resolute commitment to telling stories about Black life without the white gaze, Toni Morrison articulated a model of community empowerment grounded in local knowledge, intra-communal collaboration, and the self-reflexive narration of Black worlds. While Morrison remains one of the most visible public advocates of this aesthetic and ethical orientation, practices of Black worldmaking across African and diasporic literatures have long exceeded mere response to anti-Blackness. Even under conditions structured by racial violence, coloniality, displacement, and social rupture, Black communities have continually generated modes of life, relation, memory, and imagination that assert the possibility of worlds otherwise.

This panel invites papers examining how Black writers from Africa and its wider diaspora conceptualize Black worldmaking as an autonomous project of community empowerment without denying the persistent encroachment of anti-Blackness or collapsing entirely into its logic. How do literary texts imagine forms of communal life that emerge through fugitivity, refusal, rebellion, rememory, spirituality, indigeneity, anti-normativity, or decolonial practice? In what ways do Black literatures produce alternative epistemologies, ethical relations, and modes of collective being that resist containment within dominant social and political frameworks?

Papers engaging African, African American, Afro-diasporic, Caribbean, Afro-futurist, and transnational Black literary traditions across genres and historical periods are welcome.

Please note that this session is going to be in-person only.

Submit abstracts to the session chair through the NeMLA portal below:

https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22326,