Call for Papers
Affective Worlds: Emotions and Aesthetics in Afro-Descendant Women’s Writing
International Conference
On 24-25 May 2027, CLIC members Isabella Villanova and Elisabeth Bekers are organizing an international conference within the framework of the research project AFROPEMOTIONS.
The conference explores the role of affect, emotions, and aesthetics in the rich and diverse body of work published in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by women writers of African heritage from African, European, Caribbean, and other diasporic contexts.
The “affective turn” witnessed across the humanities and social sciences over the past two decades (Clough and Halley 2007) has likewise increased interest in affect and emotions within literary studies (Ahern 2024). In recent years, affective approaches have been productively applied to diverse literary fields, including environmental narratives (Weik von Mossner 2017), North American feminist poetics (Milne 2018), colonial and postcolonial fiction (Scott 2019; Vernay et al. 2024), South African post apartheid literature (Libin 2020), and Anglophone African and diasporic women’s writing (Leetsch 2021; Kögler 2023; Suárez Rodríguez 2024). The conference builds on and expands this body of scholarship by examining how affect and emotions shape both the sociopolitical dimensions of Afro-descendant women’s literature and its narrative and aesthetic practices across multiple linguistic, cultural, and historical contexts and through fiction, poetry, and drama. By often exploring issues of displacement, marginalisation, systemic oppression, colonial legacies, trauma, cultural memory, and environmental change, Afro-descendant women authors present affect as a site of self-awareness, resistance, community formation, and political imagination, while articulating it through narrative form, language, imagery, and other aesthetic strategies.
The event brings together established and early-career researchers working at the intersection of different fields, including affect studies, African and African diasporic literary studies, comparative literary studies, feminist and queer studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, trauma and cultural memory studies, and the environmental humanities. While acknowledging theoretical distinctions between affect and emotion, particularly those developed in affect theory by scholars such as Tomkins (1962) and Massumi (2002), the conference welcomes literary criticism informed by diverse affective frameworks, such as cognitive and narratological perspectives on affect (e.g. Hogan 2003, 2011), sociopolitical approaches to affect and emotions (e.g. Ahmed 2004; Berlant 2011), and affective ecocriticism (e.g. Bladow and Ladino 2018).
More information can be found in the full call for papers below. Proposals are due 10 January 2027.
