Even as panelists explore the sociopolitical, historical, and cultural dimensions of emancipatory writing, the presenters, working with texts from Africa and the Americas, attend to questions of form, poetics, creativity, and what we might call the “rhetorics of freedom.” The panelists will address animating questions of what is inherited and reimagined in Afrodiasporic narratives of slavery and emancipation. We will think together about how myriad literary forms, narrative strategies, and differing historical and linguistic contexts expand the possibilities for Black free life.
Groundbreaking scholarship on slavery and diaspora including Arlene Keizer’s Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery (2018), Valerie Smith’s Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (1987), Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad’s Slavery and the Literary Imagination (1989), Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997/2022), Kimberly Juanita Brown’s The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary (2015), Madhu Dubey’s illuminating essays on this theme, to name only a few, provide an indispensable foundation. The panel’s diasporic aim draws on, among others, the critical works of Tejumola Olaniyan and Carol Boyce-Davies.
To highlight the heterogeneity of Black emancipation narratives, we have four panelists, each at different academic stages, representing various institution types and subjectivities in relation to Black emancipation narratives, who will give 12-minute papers to allow time for introductions and 15-minute Q&A and discussion.
Our first two panelists will be Xavier Lee and Sandra Boateng whose work centers on emancipation from the perspective of African protagonists and questions of generational inheritances. Lee will offer a theoretical and theological paper on the rhetorical use of prolepsis and divine providence in historic narratives of enslavement. Lee charts how formerly enslaved narrators employ certain narrative techniques and religious beliefs to connect the familial ruptures of the past with the freedom dreams of the narrator’s present. Boateng, our second panelist, will then present a paper on texts centered on Ghana, including Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and Manu Herbstein’s Ama, which she reads as instances of literary and physical “Sanko-space,” after the Akan term “Sankofa,” where we look back to retrieve a lost past such as at Cape Coast Castle, but also endure and possibly find places of healing in the present.
Next, we will move to the legacies of slavery in the lusophone and hispanophone Americas with our last two panelists, Alexander Aguayo and Jordan Jones. Each of these scholars turns to the poetic practices of Black women, specifically Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian, and ecocriticism as a point of departure for their studies of emancipation outside an Anglophone context. Aguayo will interpret Nancy Morejón’s Madrigal for a Black Prince (Madrigal para un príncipe negro), exploring the interplay of singular vs. collective narrative voice that flows like a river across her works. Aguayo connects the figure of enjambment to ideas of “overflow” in Morejón’s poetry including “Balada para Emmett Till” (“Ballad for Emmett Till”). The final panelist, Jones, considers intertwining questions around Black maternity, nautical metaphors, geographic flows, and intergenerational relationships between Afro-Brazilian women using a concept he terms “reberthing.” Jones employs Conceição Evaristo’s classic poem, “Women-voices” [Vozes-mulheres] and the concept of “freedom life” as the poetic prism through which to read both historic 19th century narratives of enslavement and 21st century contemporary narratives including reading Maria Firmina dos Reis’s Úrsula (1859) alongside Eliana Alves Cruz’s Solitária (2025).
Presented together, the work of Lee, Boateng, Aguayo, and Jones, announces the creative possibilities of the ongoing project of freedom in Black narratives across time, genre, language, and geography. As Rinaldo Walcott’s work attests, the movement toward Black freedom is part of the process of “long emancipation.” In this generative dialogue, we hope this panel will help us conceptualize how we might push ever forward toward this goal.