The idea of hospitality as a simple, symmetrical exchange of welcome becomes fraught in the context of travel to the various places associated with the African Diaspora. For example, in Lose Your Mother, Sadiya Hartman considers the symbolic loss of a homeland and the sense of relation between her and the people of Ghana. Like many other African Americans, she questions whether a connection to Africa is real or just a necessary fiction. Her narrative marks the loss of identifiable origins or homeland as the primal loss for African Americans. The loss of this connection creates issues of subjectivity for the African diasporic community in general and for individuals who intimately feel this loss. Lose Your Mother shows Hartman struggling to recover from the symbolic collapse of Africa as motherland that she experiences even before her travels. From diaspora authors and artists returning to ancestral or historical sites, to the infrastructures of tourism and heritage that determine who is welcomed and how, hospitality offers a critical lens for reading the journey itself — not merely arrival or return — as the site where welcome is extended, withheld, or radically reimagined.

For this panel, we invite submissions that explore hospitality in the context of travel by artists and authors who reflect on African diasporic identity and how and why they engage with certain spaces during these travels. How can we examine hospitality as both an ethical ideal and as a historically racialized practice central to African diaspora travel writing and journey narratives? How does the experience of the journey find a shape or form in the resulting narrative or art? What does it mean to be a “guest” in spaces where your ancestors called “home,” and what conclusions do these writers and artists draw from these travels? How is the idea of in(hospitality) itself embedded in the African diasporic experience, and how does the travel narrative or art produced as a result of that travel expose it?

Submit a 300-word proposal and a short biography here: https://samla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19723 by August 31, 2026. SAMLA Conference 2026 will take place in Atlanta, GA, from November 5-7 at the Wyndham Atlanta Buckhead Hotel and Conference Center. You must be a member of SAMLA to participate.