This bilingual, French-English seminar mobilizes the conceptual expression “Atlantic Africa,” that has increasingly gained critical purchase among scholars as a means to foreground the crucial role that the histories, in addition to artistic and critical offerings, from continental Africa have played in the making and remaking of the Atlantic World (Herman L. Bennett 2019,  Jessica Marie Johnson 2020, Cécile Fromont 2014, J. Lorand Matory 2005, Lorelle Semley 2017, James H. Sweet 2014, and John Thornton 1998). Along this vein, the conveners of this seminar affirm that spaces and places that have contended with differential forms of imperialism in French are particularly instructive to elucidating what Atlantic Africa is and was.

While signaling the aforementioned focal point, “Atlantic Africa” likewise functions both as a corrective continuation of Black Atlantic studies in addition to moving beyond the zeitgeist of Afropolitanism’s aesthetics and poetics. Over the past decades, the editors of special issues of Research in African Literatures, Simon Gikandi (1996) and later Yogital Goyal (2014) have reckoned with the phantasmagoric presence of continental Africa in the field of Black Atlantic studies and most revealingly in Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Additionally, the francosphere appears as a backdrop to a largely anglocentric conception of the Black Atlantic as evidenced in Gilroy’s monograph, which valorized the contributions of African American expatriates over their French intellectual counterparts, Black évolué·e·s, in mid-twentieth-century Paris. Afropolitanism indeed has responded to the erasure of Africa in critical conceptions of Blackness and diaspora by privileging the subjectivity of contemporary African immigrants and by turning attention to the multidirectional, multigenerational, internal and external migrations that have long shaped Africa (Salah M. Hassan 2020, Achille Mbembe 2007). With a concerted effort for delineating “criticism after postcoloniality” (David Scott 1999), Afropolitanism often minimizes the ability of Atlantic slavery’s past to define recent iterations of the African Diaspora. “Atlantic Africa” picks up and reorients this work away from discourses on the global and toward a more tailored intervention on thinking the afterlives of colonial francospheres through the historical and cultural specificities of Afro-Atlantic worlds.

Through an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach that assembles research about visual culture, literature, and the historical record, this seminar attempts to balance the hermeneutic and the empirical. We invite 250-300 word abstracts, in French or English, that engage with various Afro-Francospheres that enlarge the dynamism of “Atlantic Africa.” Selected seminar participants will be encouraged to contribute to an in-progress special journal issue.