How do African and African diasporic writers, artists, and intellectuals reimagine emancipation as a decolonial project? In response to the Presidential Theme, Emancipatory Narratives, this panel poses this question to invite critical reflections on the varied articulations of emancipation in contemporary African and African diasporic literary and cultural forms. While neo-liberal notions of emancipation mask the perpetual problem of unfreedom within the very logics and claims of freedom, writers and artists thinking from entangled sites of struggles for decolonization have sought to reimagine freedom through radical modes and practices of substantive emancipation. This panel focuses on how African/Black liberatory ideas, aesthetics, and politics unravel the possibilities and limits of emancipation as a decolonial project. It examines the multiple and overlapping imaginaries of emancipation, the historical, political, and socio-cultural conditions that shape them, and their critiques in literary and cultural forms from different theoretical lenses and interdisciplinary perspectives. Bringing together four speakers from diverse intellectual positionalities, this panel opens up the space for conversation on the conceptual fluidity and aesthetic flexibility through which emancipation is reimagined in the work of writers and artists of African descent. Each speaker will be allotted 15 minutes to present their papers following the presider’s short introduction of the panel and the speakers. The remaining time will be dedicated to conversation with the audience.

In the first presentation, Rebecca Amonor examines two anglophone novels, Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing (2016) and Tochi Onyebuchi's War Girls (2019), as emancipatory interventions in African diasporic literature. Amonor argues that second-generation African immigrant writers deploy narrative complexity as a decolonial strategy to reconceptualize fluidity as a profound liberatory act. Through polyvocal narratives and characters who traverse ethnic and national identities, both writers construct anticolonial frameworks that simultaneously trouble the fixed nature of ethnic borders through shared language, kinship, and culture. Their work offers a model of emancipation that is aesthetic, and deeply diasporic, illuminating how literary imagination becomes a vital site of freedom, self-determination, and resistance against colonial and postcolonial structures of containment and erasure.

William J Spurlin, in the second presentation, explores the emancipatory implications for decolonization as represented in recent francophone literature from the Maghreb. Spurlin argues that writers being positioned in the space between two distinct cultural worlds, between Africa and Europe—living lives in diaspora, thus being both of Africa and of other worlds at the same time—negotiate new forms of gender and sexual dissidence through migration as a simultaneous act of translation. In this act, struggles for alternative modes of being are articulated by decentering the inherited colonial language of the Maghreb and transgressing the structures and received meanings of European French. These struggles offer new possibilities for queering, and thus, reimagining emancipation beyond lingering imperial taxonomies in the aftermath of colonialism.

In the third presentation, Pilar Caceres Cartagena shifts attention to the emancipatory imagination in the multimodal and embodied cultural practices of the Afro-Peruvian artist and thinker, Victoria Santa Cruz. Pilar examines Santa Cruz’s reconceptualization of rhythm as an ontological and epistemological intervention in Afro-Peruvian feminism. Drawing on Santa Cruz’s writings, with specific attention to her book Rhythm, the Eternal Organizer (2004), and her performances in the documentary Black Women (1978), this presentation analyzes rhythm as a mode of collective, affective, and relational practice of emancipation grounded in ancestral memory and African diasporic cosmologies. Santa Cruz positions rhythm as her call to liberatory action, allowing the reaffirmation of Black and female identity beyond colonial narratives that render Blackness nonexistent in the Peruvian context.

The final presentation by Tosin Gbogi traces the problem of emancipation in an alternative archive of trans-Atlantic slavery and its afterlife in modern African poetry. Gbogi contends that from the twentieth century to the present, African poets have consistently represented the African migrant in the image of the enslaved—that is, as a figure forced into a life of terminal bondage with little or no hope on the horizon of escape. The presentation teases out how this metaphorical substitution, this radical troubling of linearities and chronologies, might force attention on alternative ways of thinking about the African migrant who, between political rhetoric and sensational journalism, has too often been approached as merely a figure of the present. It closes with a reflection on how the poetic imagination speaks to the im/possibility of global Black liberation today.

Together, these presentations engage the complexities of emancipation in a diverse range of textual forms, linguistic and cultural geographies, and critical perspectives in ways that enrich our understanding of the poetics and politics of decolonial imagination.