A/Prof. Polo B. Moji (English Literary Studies) and Dr. Laura Nkula-Wenz (African Centre for Cities) are pleased to announce this call for papers for an edited volume of African Literary Cities: Hubs, Maps and Urban Literary Ecologies. The book aims to address the “absenting” of African literary cities – a complex engagement with urbanity and literariness – in both globally authoritative cultural policy discourses and the emerging scholarly field of Literary Urban Studies.
Concept Note:
Does the city, conceived as a literary form that traces modernist and imperialist pathways, deny the possibility of literary cities existing in the global south, and particularly on the African continent? Perusing the list of UNESCO’s creative cities, a glaring absence becomes visible in the creative field of literature through the over-representation of UNESCO Cities of Literature in Europe and North America. The dearth of African ‘Cities of Literature’ in dominant cultural governance discourse belies a vibrant African literary scene that remains invisible when seen through the developmentalist lens criteria of ‘hard literary infrastructures’, (e.g. publishing houses, libraries, bookstores). This traps the African city in a moment of ‘unfinished development’ and does not account for the dynamic and diverse literary and urban encounters that produce the African literary city. Moreover, Sarah Brouillette’s Underdevelopment and African Literature: Emerging Forms of Reading (2020) problematises the way in which the knowledge economy of the “cultured city” ties urban planning to literary infrastructures such as writers’ festivals (34-35). Brouillette’s productive mapping of the complex overlaps between dominant “high-literary niche, all aligned roughly with cultivation and sale of paperbound book” and emergent literary forms of literature for “people on the move and looking for relatively short immersive experiences in reading” (49), informs the thinking around the “literary ecologies” and pan-African literary “hubs” that this edited volume seeks to explore.
Located at the intersection of Southern urbanism and literary studies, this volume frames the African literary city as spatial narratives that (re) produce themselves in both material and imaginative forms. We therefore invite submissions that allow for productive conversations between the imaginaries (literariness) and material complexity of African cities (urbanity) by scholars, practitioners and literary activists from the continent and its diasporas.
Chapters may consider, but are not limited to, the following areas:
- the historical ascendency and decline of particular literary spaces on the continent
- the literariness that arises out of the crises of the postcolonial city
- literary cities as pan-African hubs in a network of regional and continental collective imaginaries of African urbanity
- popular narrative forms, which emerge from “the episteme of the everyday” (Newell, Okome and Forster, 2014; Musila 2020 ) and the urban networks that these produce (e.g. market literature, flash fiction and literary magazines)
- inherited ideas about African literariness through the histories of canonical African book publishers (Brouillette, 2020)
- the curation and experiences of literary festivals, writers’ circles and poetry groups as sites of “literary encounter”
- literary genres associated with urbanity (e.g. noir or crime fiction)
- street literatures (Harris and Hållén, 2018) such as zines and spoken word
- African languages and the politics of translation in spaces of literary encounter.
Time frames:
- Abstracts of 250-300 words, along with a short bio-note of no more than 100 words, to be received by 23rd December 2024
- Notification of Acceptance by 30th January 2025
- Chapters to be received by 30th September 2025
Abstract submissions to be made to: polo.moji@uct.ac.za or laura.nkula@uct.ac.za
About the African Literary Cities project:
As a form of urbanity, the literary city can be considered a narrative that (re)produces itself in both material and imaginative forms and can thus not be read solely with one single disciplinary lens. This project therefore motivates for a transdisciplinary, multimodal mapping of the literary urban ecologies of African cities, centring the intersection of literariness and cityness through a dual focus on materiality and the imaginary. We are not concerned with creating an authoritative definition of the African Literary City. We are interested rather to map how literary cityness is locally produced in the contexts of dynamic African cities that are constantly “cast out into the world” (Simone, 2001), making connections of all kinds through their literary (re)presentation.
