The Comparison of African Literature
Description
The Comparison of African Literature
Recent monographs such as Sarah Quesada’s, The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature (2022) and Duncan Yoon’s China in Twentieth and Twenty-First-Century African Literature (2023) have renewed interest in the capacities of African literary and cultural comparisons within geographic, historical, and diasporic contexts. Building on these monographs, as well as the recent Comparative Literature Studies special issue on “African Literatures and the Question of Form” (2025), we propose to deepen the conversation by exploring other African literary sites as the basis for thinking about literary and cultural comparison. Rather than only examine one-to-one comparisons between literary texts, however informative, we are interested in somewhat unorthodox comparisons. To give a framing example, an intervention could be conceived of as both a vertical exploration into indigenous ontologies (e.g. animism, ubuntu, the online) as well as a horizontal look at the geo-historical contexts (e.g. Indian Ocean, trans-Saharan, environmental/blue humanities) of African literary relations. We would like to refrain from thinking about these vectors as mutually exclusive, but rather to explore the ways in which they can be seen as co-constitutive over both the longue and even digital durées. The ACLA provides a unique platform through which to center African literature as the explicit point of comparative departure.
Possible topics to include (but not limited to):
African literatures in comparison
Digital/AI forms
Indigenous cosmologies
African literary forms
Translation
Language
African literary ecologies
African literature and canonicity
African/postcolonial literary adaptation
The African literary archive
Animisms
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Ivana Ancic is an Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Cortland. Her research centers African literature within a Global South paradigm. Her publications in Modern Fiction Studies, English Language Notes, and Word & Image focus on archival and nonarchival memory production, indigenous epistemologies, and African feminist conceptions of the human and nonhuman.
Speaker Bio
Viola Bao is PhD student in Comparative Literary Studies and English at Northwestern University.
Speaker Bio
Sakiru Adebayo is an assistant professor and the James and Eva Good Chair of African and Postcolonial Literature at Western University. He is the author of Continuous Pasts: Frictions of Memory in Postcolonial Africa (finalist for the Memory Studies Association First Book Award).
Papers
Speaker Bio
Antje Ziethen is Associate Professor of Francophone Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She specializes in global literatures in French and African Literatures, with a particular focus on (urban) space, migration, transnationalism, and gender. Antje Ziethen is the author of Géo/Graphies postcoloniales (2013). Her most recent publications deal with migration in African literatures, the Black Mediterranean, speculative fiction, and the concept of geographic metafiction.
Speaker Bio
Thuyen Viet Truong (he/him) is a PhD student studying global Anglophone literature with a focus on Africa and Africa-Asia relations. His current doctoral research aims to read Africa-Asia relations through the lenses of ecology, print culture, and literary and cultural studies, articulating a theory of “eco-relationality” and a concept of “instrumental analogy” to interpret African literature(s) in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Speaker Bio
Kyle Wanberg is Assoc. Professor in Liberal Studies at NYU and author of Maps of Empire (UToronto, 2020). His Ph.D. was in CompLit from UCI. Wanberg has published work in Journal of African Cinemas, Research in African Literatures, Comparative Literature Studies, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Journal of Lit Theory and Comp Lit, among others. His research focuses on African literatures and cinemas, and is engaged in a project in representations of financial imperialism in Africa.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Ryan Topper is Associate Professor of English at Western Oregon University and Research Fellow in English at Stellenbosch University. He is the author of Animist Poetics: Ancestral Trauma and Regeneration in African Literature (SUNY Press, 2025).
Speaker Bio
Originally from Canada, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma is Associate Professor of English and a core faculty member of the Institute of African Studies at Emory University in Atlanta. He is the author of Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and African Poetry Worlds in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). With Ryan Topper, he co-edited Poetics from the Global South, a double special issue of Interventions (2024).
Speaker Bio
Jean-Hugues BITA’A MENYE is an instructor of French with the Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He holds a doctoral degree in Comparative Literature from the same university. His research interests include post-colonial African literatures and cultures, contemporary noir, political ideologies, and feminist theories.