This investigation of Black internationalism and Black diasporic literature was inspired by Fred Moten’s musing about Black autochthony during “Some Questions Regarding the Persistence of (Black) Poetry,” his talk at the “Poetics of Persistence in Black Life” Presidential Plenary at the 2021 MLA Convention. Moten's suggestions about the necessity of Black refusals of authochthony were riffs on important work by American Studies scholars like Kandice Chuh’s The Difference Aesthetics Makes (2019) and Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds: Black Women And The Cartographies Of Struggle (2006).

In “Richard Wright and the French Republic of Letters,” Eric Strand examines Wright's novel The Outsider (1953) and its relationship to Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters (1999). Strand posits that Wright’s Paris-consecrated oeuvre made Casanova’s Republic of Letters far more ecumenical, and served as a model for Black writers around the world who looked to Wright himself for inspiration. The MLA convention is an ideal forum for this work in light of Strand’s January 2021 PMLA article “Du Bois’s Dark Princess, Kautilya’s Arthashastra, and the Welfare State.”

In “Where Do We Belong? Glocal Blackness and The Family Unit in Diasporic African Literatures,” Cristovão Nwachukwu examines the novels Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi and Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi. He argues that race and nationality intersect in diasporic narratives that showcase the polysemy of blackness hinging on intergenerational family dynamics, which in turn fragment the African family unit. In this comparative analysis, Nwachukwu uses the concept of Afropolitanism to analyze the extent to which Africans conceptualize belonging as being bound by specific locations.

Following that discussion, in “Black Mobility and Lusophone Afropolitanism in Twenty-First Century Europe: A Reading of Kalaf Epalanga’s Work,” Marisol Fila traces the promises and constraints that articulation of a Lusophone Afropolitan identity in twenty-first-century Europe encounters as it engages with global and local shifting cultural and political contexts. Fila limns the possibilities and limitations of Black mobility in contemporary Europe as it is represented in two of Kalaf Epalanga’s works, O angolano que comprou Lisboa (por metade de preço) [The Angolan Who Bought Lisbon for Half the Price] (2014) and Também os brancos sabem dançar [Whites Also Know How to Dance] (2017). Fila argues that whereas O angolano...is a celebration of Black mobility and a Lusophone Afropolitan identity, Também os brancos... highlights the limitations of such movement and identity, by addressing the intersections of citizenship, race, class and gender that shape it.

Finally, in “Imagining Rupture: James Baldwin’s Africa,” Ariel Martino reads James Baldwin’s 1957 essay “Princes and Powers,” which details the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists, and considers the capacity of literature to contend with the loss of the Middle Passage. She claims that Baldwin articulates a fundamental alienation between the African and African American participants in the congress, one that he extrapolates to a larger claim about the divergences that keep their political interests and aesthetic values removed. Martino argues that the essay also reveals continuities and moments of accord across Black literary practices that suggest a common aesthetic used by writers to process history. As such, Baldwin’s essay is a precursor to other writing from the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean that treats African heritage as a site of imagination.

“Black Is/Not a Place II” is an extension of the “Black Is/Not a Place I” guaranteed panel for which we received an overwhelming number of strong abstracts. In keeping with the panel's methodology, the international roster of panellists for “Black Is/Not a Place II” represent a range of academic ranks. Each participant will be given 15 minutes to share their work which will allow for at least 15 minutes of discussion in what we hope will be a sustained cross-panel discourse.