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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Afro-European (Con)Texts
| Panel |
41. The Art of Wor(l)d Markets: Development, Diaspora, and Narratives of Africa in Europe
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| Paper ID | 62 |
| Author(s) |
Brancato, Sabrina
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | When one looks at the corpus of texts produced by Afrosporic authors in Europe, the first feature one encounters is plurality: plurality of the languages used (mother tongues in some cases and second languages in other), plurality of the authors’ African heritages, and plurality of their European locations (many authors have lived in more than one European country), all this adding to the specificities of individual experience. Moreover, Afrosporic literatures develop in different European countries at different times (how to reconcile the long and already canonised tradition of Black writing in former imperial nations such as Britain or France with the much more recent and more isolated Afrosporic voices in countries of recent immigration such as Italy or Spain?) and follow very different patterns (target readership, editorial policies and marketing strategies vary widely from country to country). Would it make sense then, at a time when even the notion of Europe itself is called into question, to talk about an Afro-European literature? My paper seeks to trace commonalities and differences of Afrosporic literary production in different European contexts and argues that a comparatist perspective both at a diachronic and a synchronic level is paramount to the understanding of new literary configurations across linguistic and national boundaries. |
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