At the core of the panel is the claim that recent African diasporic narratives reconfigure migration as a site of praxis. Across the texts examined, individual and familial experiences foreground strategies of survival and self-fashioning in the face of state and communal violence, while simultaneously recasting the terms of belonging and destabilizing fixed notions of “home” and “exile.” Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches spanning migration studies, memory studies, literary studies, cinema studies, and feminist theory, the panel collectively challenges crisis-centered paradigms that have dominated representations of African migration. Instead, it highlights how these works imagine (im)mobility as a generative condition through which new possibilities emerge.
Each presentation contributes a distinct analytical lens to this shared inquiry. Ibrahim Williams introduces the concept of “refugee intimacies” to examine how undocumented families reorganize relational life under overlapping regimes of state and communal surveillance in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s A Season in France and Sulaiman Addonia’s The Consequences of Love. He foregrounds intimacy, through this study, as a fragile yet inventive praxis of survival.
Chiraz Amani turns to Hind Soyer’s Algériennes: de mère en fille to theorize the “in-between” as an emancipatory site wherein matrilineal memory and postcolonial archive work unsettle Eurocentric binaries of home and exile on the one hand, and on the other hand reframe diasporic belonging through gendered agency.
Diweng Dafong, in turn, examines return migration and develops the concept of “femigritude” to analyze Francophone and Anglophone African women’s fiction. She argues that narratives of return function as ongoing epistemological reorientation that destabilizes the linear model of migration and reimagines belonging as a critical interpretive practice. Taken together, these papers make the case for the ways African diasporic narratives articulate migration as a dynamic field of multi-spatial negotiations that accommodates emancipatory possibilities represented through inventive reworking of intimacy, memory, and mobility.
Beyond the individual presentations, the session is designed to encourage lively and sustained discussion on the broader implications of emancipatory narratives as a lens for understanding migration. The conversation will engage both the representational strategies and the theoretical stakes of these texts, with particular attention to how marginalized voices—women, Afro-Arabs, North Africans, and refugees—reshape the contours of African diasporic studies. In this regard, the panel reflects a strong commitment to intellectual and disciplinary diversity as it brings together perspectives from African feminist, Black Anglophone, Black Francophone, and Afro-Arab studies to offer a richly intersectional engagement with contemporary migration narratives.
The session will be structured to ensure a balanced and engaging discussion within the 1-hour and 15-minute time frame. Each of the three panelists will present for 17 minutes (51 minutes total). This will be followed by 15 minutes of Q&A to encourage a moderated exchange between panelists and audience members. The remaining 9 minutes will be allocated to the presider for introductions and to facilitate transitions between speakers.