The book launch takes place online on Thursday, 3
October 2024, from 6pm till 7.30pm UK time, as part of the Africa
Migration Report Readings and Conversations series.
Attendance and participation are free and open to all.
To attend, please register here.
As part of the event, Professors Losambe and Ojaide will give a presentation
on The Handbook and share thoughts and reflections on what
works of literature add to the conversation that is taking place at a familial,
community, national, continental and international level, on African migration.
The presentation and discussion will be followed by a Q&A session with all
present.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The Routledge Handbook of the New
African Diasporic Literature introduces world literature
readers to the transnational, multivocal writings of immigrant African authors.
Covering works produced in Europe, North America, and elsewhere in the world,
this book investigates three major aesthetic paradigms in African diasporic
literature: the Sankofan wave (late 1960s–early 1990s); the Janusian wave
(1990s–2020s); and the Offshoots of the New Arrivants (those born and growing
up outside Africa).
Written by well-established and emerging scholars of African and diasporic
literatures from across the world, the chapters in the book cover the works of
well-known and not-so-well-known Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone writers
from different theoretical positionalities and critical approaches, pointing
out the unique innovative artistic qualities of this major subgenre of African
literature. The focus on the “diasporic consciousness” of the writers and their
works sets this handbook apart from others that solely emphasize migration,
which is more of a process than the community of settled African people
involved in the dynamic acts of living reflected in diasporic writings.
This book will appeal to researchers and students from across the fields of
Literature, Diaspora Studies, African Studies, Migration Studies, and
Postcolonial Studies.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Lokangaka Losambe is the Frederick M. and Fannie C.P. Corse
Professor of English at the University of Vermont. He previously taught
African, African Diaspora and English literatures at universities in Nigeria,
the Democratic Republic of Congo, Swaziland, and South Africa. His numerous
publications include Postcolonial Agency in African and Diasporic
Literature and Film: A Study in Globalectics; Borderline Movements
in African Fiction; An introduction to the African Prose Narrative; Literature,
the Visual Arts and Globalization in Africa and Its Diaspora (edited
with Maureen Eke); Pre-colonial and Post-colonial Drama and Theatre in
Africa (edited with Devi Sarinjeive); and The Routledge
Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature (edited with Tanure
Ojaide). Dr. Losambe also served as the president of the African Literature
Association (ALA) in 2012-2013.
Educated at Ibadan and Syracuse Universities, Tanure Ojaide has
published twenty-five collections of poetry, as well as four novels, five short
story collections, three memoirs, and fourteen self-authored and co-authored
scholarly books. He has won the Association of Nigerian Authors’ Poetry Prize
four times (1988, 1994, 2003, and 2011). His other awards include the
Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Africa Region (1988), the All-Africa Okigbo
Prize for Poetry (1988), and the BBC Arts and Africa Poetry Award (1988). He
was the Winner of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s prestigious
First Citizens Bank Scholar Medal Award for 2005. In 2016 he won both the
African Literature Association's Folon-Nichols Award for Excellence in Writing
and the Nigerian National Order of Merit Award for the Humanities. In 2018 he
co-won the Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. He has won the National
Endowment for the Humanities grant, twice the Fulbright Senior Scholar
fellowship, and twice the Carnegie African Diaspora Program fellowship. Ojaide
is currently the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Africana
Studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.
ABOUT THE ORGANISERS
The event is organised by Forced Migration and The Arts, CivicLeicester and
Regularise as part of the Africa Migration Report Poetry Anthology’s Readings
and Conversations series which hosts a series of online readings, presentations
and conversations focusing on the arts and African migration.
The Africa Migration Report poetry
anthology series, which we are currently working on, was inspired by
the Africa Migration Report: 2nd Edition, a report by the
African Union and International Organisation on Migration, published in March
2024, which presents research on African migration and mobility, and on the
status of continental integration policies as outlined in the African Union
Agenda 2063. While the AU-IOM’s African Migration Report is a formal report,
our poetry anthology series explores the pasts, presents and futures of African
migration through poetry, short prose and conversation with poets on the
African continent and in the diaspora.
Forced Migration and The Arts is an
international network that brings together people with lived experience of
forced migration, refugee and non-refugee artists, academics and art spaces for
conversation looking at work taking place at the intersection where forced
migration and the arts meet. The network hosts monthly indabas or discussion
forums on the last Thursday of each month and encourages mutual support and
collaboration among participants. A playlist of some of the conversations we
have had so far is accessible here.
Regularise was
founded in late 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, to address the years of
sustained hardships that undocumented migrants experience in the UK and
continues to organise and campaign for justice and for the rights of
undocumented migrants.
CivicLeicester, is an indie
publisher that uses print and digital technologies, social media platforms, the
arts, and online and in-person events to highlight conversations of
transnational interest and significance. Books we have edited and published
include Black Lives Matter: Poems for a New
World (2023), Poetry and Settled Status for All: An Anthology (2022)
and Bollocks to Brexit: An Anthology of Poems and Short
Fiction (2019).
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