During the June 1962 Conference of African Writers of English Expression at Makerere College in Kampala, Uganda, participants debated whether, by writing in English, they were creating African literature. What language should an African author write in? Could they use an imperial language and still produce an African literary text? This idea — that a writer not only could but ought to choose the right literary language — has often been called “the language question.”

Famously, in the years following the Makerere conference, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o renounced English, changed his name, and began writing in Gikũyũ. This decision was later mirrored in June 1974 by Michael Hartnett who declared that he would stop writing in English and instead write in Irish. Scholars, too, have taken up the language question, including Maya Boutaghou in White Tongue, Brown Skin (2024) and Yasemin Yildiz in Beyond the Mother Tongue (2013).

Papers that ask these and other questions are invited:

• Can a writer truly choose one language over another? What factors enable or delimit that choice?
• What presumptions does the language question make about authenticity and identity?
• Does a poet have the same leeway of choice as a novelist?
• What life experiences compel writers to work in different languages from those in which they began their craft or in which they were raised and educated?
• What resemblance does the language question share (or not) across time periods, cultural contexts, literary traditions, canons, languages and dialects, geographical regions, and genres?
• How does colonialism influence what languages writers use?
• How do processes of racialization impact the question of language in literary production?
• To what extent and how does the language question make translation contentious or exigent?
• How does the language question rely on concepts of mother tongues and native speakers?
• How do theories of monolingualism, bilingualism, multilingualism, creolization, language shift, and diglossia intersect with or diverge from the language question?
• How does the choice of language in literary production support decolonization efforts?
• How is the “national language question” reflected in development economics and challenged in critiques of underdevelopment?
• How is the language question expressed across different language families?
• Does the language question assume ontological distinctions between official or state-promoted languages and minoritized or minority languages?
• To what extent do language revitalization projects and processes reflect (or not) the presumptions of the language question?
• When and how is an imposed imperial language assimilated into social life and literary production?

Proposals should include abstracts of no more than 300 words along with a biographical statement of no more than 75 words.