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