Emancipatory narratives have always been a tool of African women writers who have sought to denounce or dismantle oppressive systems but they are often studied by specialists of oral literature and less so by scholars looking at written texts. Aïssata Sidikou’s Recreating Words, Reshaping Worlds: The Verbal Art of Women from Niger, Mali, and Senegal (2002) illustrates examples of the powerful traditions of women’s oral storytelling in the Sahel. Through various oral traditions, African women have long exercised their right to protest but also to reclaim rights and power that have been stolen or threatened. While African oral literature has existed for centuries but in some cases, such traditions have excluded women or non-initiates and this is how written literature has become an important tool for expressing emancipatory narratives both on the continent and in the African diaspora. In the case of Malian women's writing, for example, authors like Adame Ba Konaré have spoken about griot and griottes (initiated traditional storytellers) and the restrictions women have confronted and the impossibility of non-initiates to express themselves using various customary oralities. Written narratives in contemporary contexts, however, have given women more freedom of expression since there are not restrictions on the caste or gender of the writer. This panel looks at various aspects of revolutionary emancipatory narratives by African women writers across the continent and the diaspora that come from different language traditions but which concentrate on oppression that stems from patriarchy, colonialism, neo-colonialism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination in contemporary societies. Written narratives from the African continent and diaspora often appropriate genres from Western literature and thus African women writers must decolonize these genres while at the same time claiming the narrative as a means of emancipation. In the Francophone tradition, for example, one of the first such written emancipatory narratives was Aoua Keita’s Femme d’Afrique: la vie d’Aoua Kéita racontée par elle-meme, a rare look at the French Sudan from 1928 to 1960 as told by a well-educated woman who was a medical professional and later a political figure. It is well known that works by African male writers of the period had ignored both the plight of women in the struggle for independence from France and also the importance of women’s emancipation in the future success of a nation. Kéita’s voice filled an enormous gap in information. Her journey allowed her to narrate two struggles: the fight for her country’s independence and the emancipation of Malian women at the dawn of independence. Kéita’s travels in French Sudan, in Senegal, and in Guinee enabled her to contribute to an otherwise male-dominated conversation about colonialism and patriarchy from perspectives never expressed before in writing by a Malian woman. Kéita recounted not only her own experiences but also the stories of other women. Kéita’s approach to writing her text is what Nicki Hitchcott calls “a reformulation of the autobiographical narrative, based on a recognition of the individual self as a component of a much larger, collective identity” (16). This panel explores examples of women's writing from Algeria, Equatorial Guinea, and Congo using feminist and postcolonial theories as well as queer theory. The organizer and presider will provide a brief overview of these three examples in the wider context of African women’s writing, highlighting the differences in approach of various writers on the continent but also their contribution to a collective conversation through African women's writing that has become diverse and inclusive. Three fifteen-minute presentations will offer intriguing examples of emancipatory narratives in different cultural and colonial contexts. Spurlin focuses on Algerian writer, Assia Djebar’s fragmented style of writing and how it intersperses and interrupts the historical archive with oral testimonies of surviving women participants in the Algerian Revolution as forms of resistance to masculinist colonial and post-independence narratives, thus blurring the generic borders between history and autobiography as a strategy to rewrite colonial and postcolonial history and resist attempts by Algerian nationalists to replace one history by another. Steve Puig looks at Franco-Congolese writer Nadia Yala Kisukidi’s La dissociation through a close reading of an emancipatory narrative voice and embodied experience. Puig then focuses on a poetics of fragmentation that resists both linear historiography and reductive identity politics. Finally, Ethan Hill analyzes works by Hispano-Equatoguinean writer, Angela Nzambi, that demonstrate how a racialized migrant woman can decenter herself from her autobiographical narrative to emancipate the voices of other migrant women writers from the imperialist preconception of what constitutes literature. The panel will also welcome discussion and comparative analyses from session attendees.