This Siyabonana special issue examines global African women’s rich repertoire of storytelling strategies. In doing so, we ask the questions: Who tells the story of global African women? How are these stories received and understood? Who has ownership over global African women’s narratives? We do this by centering global African (African and African Diaspora) women and communication - what they say; how they say it; what they don’t say; or what is spoken without words. We are therefore concerned with African women’s epistemologies,  with a focus on community, literature, and storytelling. As one example, the ways global African women writers use language as a means of expression, revolution, and maintaining culture allows for deeper understanding about how she depicts, challenges, and reconstructs oppressive systems and social structures imposed by colonization and imperialism. Beyond language, topics of importance include: cultural preservation; creating  ways of producing and disseminating knowledge; ways of leading and contributing to family and community (e.g. sisterhood, motherhood, womanhood); and redefining what constitutes education and learning beyond institutions. Global African women writers understand and thus represent the complexity of mitigating colonial structures while encouraging cultural adaptations and modern innovation. Global African women of the 20th century have done this in literature as pioneers in the field, using literature as a vehicle to express transformative methods to knowledge production and  storytelling, which represent the lived experiences of African women. This special issue considers their work and its continuation into how we, and 21st century global African women writers, continue this tradition. 

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We argue that global African women’s ability to tell stories beyond these borders makes the stories more accessible to their communities. From this special issue, we hope to use our scholarship and engagement in our communities to support younger scholars, advocate for self-determination and confidence to cite self and other global African women writers. We hope that this special edition will inspire others to join as we consider other opportunities to collaborate, share our work, mentor the youth, and continue the legacy of global African women telling stories and building community (e.g. conferences, book series, workshops, podcast/interview series, open sources journals that promote writing by/about global African women).

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Topics can include, but are not limited to the following: 

• Global African women’s literary voices (e.g. how they voice their opinions, how they actively engage with their realities and surroundings);

• The reframing of global African language and cultures in literature;

• The creation of global African women’s epistemologies that are organic to African realities and corrective of misrepresentations;

• Analysis of global African women’s literature in the 20th century and/or how it impacts 21st century global African women’s literature;

• Global African women’s storytelling (e.g. how she follows the tradition of past women storytellers, how she reframes storytelling in the present);

• The current/potential impact of global African women’s storytelling on the lives of African peoples;

• Methods and theories of analyzing global African women’s literature coming from African women; 

• Lived experiences or stories of global African women’s use of her epistemology through knowledge creation and innovations that benefit her family/community; and

• Ways global African women disrupt colonization and imperialism by challenging and dismantling oppressive systems and social structures.

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We invite submissions of varying forms and genres that showcase global African women (Africa and the African Diaspora). We encourage longer essays and research articles, as well as oral histories, institutional reports, book reviews, commentaries, personal testimonies, short stories, or a collection of poetry (3-5 poems). Essays, research articles, reports, and oral histories/interviews should not exceed 10,000 words; review essays, film reviews, and commentaries should not exceed 3,000 words; and book reviews should not exceed 1500 words. The length and medium of all creative work will be determined on a case-by-case basis.

 

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Special Issue Editors

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Dr. Ọlaọcha Nwadiuto Nwabara is a storyteller who uses writing and orality as a medium to represent the narratives of African peoples, cultures, histories, identities, and ways of knowing. Grounded in Black Studies, African Studies and African Diaspora Studies, Dr. Nwabara is an assistant professor of West African Literature and Cultures at the State University of New York at Geneseo. Her research, similar to her art, focuses on celebrating and elevating the stories of African descendent people, and thinking about how they represent their communities’ identities through their cultural productions (literature, film, music). Current scholarly and creative writing projects examine global Africa while focusing on Nigerian transnational identities, or the way Nigerians in the world carry their cultures where they go, and how they understand their transforming racial, ethnic, gender and sexual-based lived identities in new worlds. Her most recent publication models this: “Becoming, Writing Home: The Journey Towards Self for Community in Under the Udala Trees and the Binti trilogy.” Ultimately, Dr. Nwabara’s passion is to encourage conversations leading to self-love by embodying knowledge of self and community in order to empower self-definition and self-determination.

 

Dr. Korka Sall is the academic director of The Minnesota Studies in International Development, MSID-Senegal. She came back to Senegal after teaching and conducting research at different universities including UMass Amherst, Mount Holyoke College, and Harvard University for nine years.  Dr. Sall holds an MA and a PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst (May 2021) and her research interests include Caribbean Studies, Gender Studies, Feminist Studies, and African Diaspora Studies. Her dissertation, “Negritude Feminisms: Francophone Black Women Writers and activists in France, Martinique and Senegal from the 1920s to the 1980s. Her scholarship focuses on Post-Colonial Studies, languages and cultures; Black Studies; and gender and development. She co-published an article on Blackness and Pan-African political consciousness, available here. Sall is a passionate scholar and activist invested in promoting the contributions of African Women in Negritude, the Harlem Renaissance, Feminisms, Pan-Africanism, and other liberatory movements. She is one of the coordinators of the African Women’s Millennium Initiative on Poverty and Human Rights (AWOMI), which focuses on women and gender development.

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Feel free to contact the special issue editors for further inquiries and questions:

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Dr. Olaocha Nwabara onwabara@geneseo.edu
Dr. Korka Sall korkasall974@gmail.com