Organized by:
The American and Caribbean Studies Laboratory- LEAC- Cheikh Anta Diop University- Senegal.
The Research Group on Africa and the Diaspora Laboratory- GRAD- Abomey Calavi University- Benin.
The Laboratory of English Language, Anglophone Literatures and Civilizations– LaLiCA- Joseph K-Zerbo University- Burkina Faso.
The Research Group on Literatures from Sub-Saharan Africa and the Diaspora - (EReLAND), English Department, Faculty of Arts, Languages and Art - University of Lome- Togo.
The Research Group on English Literature and Linguistics - GRELLA, University of Bouaké - Côte d’Ivoire.
The Research Laboratory in Art and Culture LARAC- Gaston Berger University- Saint-Louis-Senegal.
The Interdisciplinary Research Group on Languages, Literatures, History, Art and Culture (CREILHAC)- Assane Seck University of Ziguinchor-Senegal.
Rationale:
The discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus undoubtedly embodies a milestone date of the 15th century. This historiographical and landmark event propelled the junction of the European, African and American continents.
In his remarkable book titled La conquête de l’Amérique : la question de l’autre, Tzvetan Todorov (1956, p.54 ) expounded that Christopher Columbus "discovered America, not the Americans". Columbus’s approach to the Amerindian world, he states, is perfectly ethnocentric, relating the tenets and ethics of the Old World to another civilization.
The historiographical incentives, then, are enormous because no other event has changed the world and its interactions at that magnitude. As the momentous process in Globalization, the discovery of America created a fertile zone for exchanges that profoundly reformed intercontinental relations, the perception of man, democracy, politics, economics and culture.
The Black Atlantic, nurturing these unbroken exchanges between the African and American continents, lays the foundations for a profound reflection on the presence of Afro-descendants in America and the African's innermost perception of the America continent.
Since the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers in North America, writing played a key role in recording the colonial experience. Subsequently, the testimony of the American experience, through writing, permeated both American literature and civilization.
Ever since, Americans have unremittingly testified to the America experience, and Africans relentlessly interpreted American and Caribbean fiction as well as nonfiction. The history of America, the birth of the Nation, its spaces, both physical and psychic, its founding ideas, its relationship with the world, the American Dream, American foreign policy, and many other concepts, constantly nurtured the curricula of Higher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa as well as the contributions of African scholars and intellectuals. America is revisited from all perspectives, literary, historical, religious, political, economic, cultural, feminist, and many areas of focus that enthused African intellectuals ‘investigation so as to construe American and Caribbean studies.
Subsequently, the aim of the international conference consists in merging the imaginary of the American (Euro-American or African-American), and construing the reception of this imaginary by the African academic and intellectual. What is the African perception of the American experience? What is the scope of that perception, given that the African ascendancy participated in the settlement and construction of the Nation? Has the Black Atlantic created common areas or intersections of cultural, political or ontological affiliations? Does this genetic attachment of the two intelligences and sensibilities provide the same historiography? Are American and Caribbean texts shaped by transatlantic travel, deportation and uprooting? In the ontological encounter of the "I″ and the "other″, it is patent that American mainstream literature provided often reductive and retracted representations that alter and corrupt the reality of the "other".
The international conference is intended for academics, researchers of all disciplines referring to America, doctoral students in the humanities and social sciences, as well as in languages and literature, affiliated to universities, doctoral schools and laboratories of American and Caribbean studies, in order to present and exchange on the reception and perception of America by African and its Diaspora.
At the end of the conference, the publication of the proceedings will be scheduled. For this purpose, the papers will be reviewed by the scientific committee and revised by their authors and submitted within the given deadline.
Objectives of the Symposium
Through the various oral communications that will be presented, the following objectives are targeted:
→Provide a sociological outline of America by African academics and intellectuals;
→Understand the complexity of American History at the crossroads of several humanities;
→Apprehend African American experience through different perspectives;
→Understand female reality in America: Gynocentrism, phallocentrism and particularly how women negotiate their identity.
→Map Black women’s struggles across America and the Caribbean.
→ Understand the aesthetic and ethical issues of intimate writing in America and Caribbean space; understand how American women writers construct and represent their life histories; grasp the aesthetic and ethical issues of intimate writing in the American and Caribbean space.
→Identify the mutual cultural spaces binding Africa and America;
→ Analyze the diplomatic relations between Africa and America.
Conference Subthemes
The conference is seeking submissions related to the following conference topics:
Subtheme 1
American literature: at the crossroads of history, identity, aesthetic and ethical issues.
Subtheme 2
Enslavement and Literature: from slave narratives to neo-slave narratives
Subtheme 3
The Contribution of Harlem Renaissance: Historiography, Culture, and Historiography
Subtheme 4
America's Wars: From the War of Independence (1776) to the Present
Subtheme 5
The Black Atlantic and the Circulation of Knowledge: America, Africa and the Caribbean
Subtheme 6
America and the World: Foreign Policy, Economic Determination and Geopolitical Issues
Subtheme 7
America and Autobiographies
Subtheme 8
Gender, Literature and Society; Feminism, Gynocriticism, Phallocentrism and Patriarchy
Subtheme 9
American Poetry
Subtheme 10
Construing Caribbean Fiction and Nonfiction
Subtheme 11
America and Religion
Subtheme 12
The American Nation and Human Rights Issues: Sociological, literary and historiographical perspectives
Practical Details
Languages of the conference: French and English
Submission Process
Proposals are to be sent no later than February the 15th 2023
Notification of acceptance: 20th 2023
Conference dates: 15-16 March 2023
Practical details
→Conference Format: face-to-face and virtual presentations
→Participation fees: Free
→Travel and Accommodation fees are the responsibility of the participants
Proposals should include the title of the paper, the forename, name, position, and institutional address of the author(s) and an abstract of 500 words at most.
→ Proposals for presentations, along with a short biography, must be submitted no later than february 15, 2022 at p.m. GMT on the conference website: https://www.scienceconf.org/
For this purpose it is necessary to first create an account on the Sciencesconf platform if you don’t have one yet: https://www.sciencesconf.org/(click in the top right tap connection).
Proposals and biography can also be sent, simultaneously, to the following three (3) addresses as a Word file:
papakingpmb@gmail.com
abdoulayendiaye21@gmail.com
fayendiome@yahoo.fr
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