Call for Papers: the Politics of African Patriography: Writing Fathers in African Literatures

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H-AfrLitCine CALL FOR PAPERS: THE POLITICS OF AFRICAN PATRIOGRAPHY: WRITING FATHERS IN AFRICAN LITERATURES

Discussion published by Olabode Ibironke on Monday, November 2, 2015

THE POLITICS OF AFRICAN PATRIOGRAPHY:

WRITING FATHERS IN AFRICAN LITERATURES

African Literature Association 2016 Conference

Atlanta, GA

Carli Coetzee (SOAS) & Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi (WESTERN, U)

CALL FOR PAPERS

In recent years, the term patriography has been increasingly invoked to describe narratives about fathers. Patriographies fulfill a wide range of functions in different literary landscapes. They can provide a format for representations of intimate lives with fathers or the examinations of father-son relations as the entry into cultures of masculinity and patrimony, but they also perform pressing cultural work when they address fathers or father figures who are also public or political figures. In African literatures, father writing abounds in all forms and examples include: Wole Soyinka’s Isara: A Voyage Around Essay, Ken Wiwa’s In the Shadow of A Saint: A Son’s Search for His Father, Aminatta Forna’s The Devil

That Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Memoir, David Achkar’s documentary

Allah Tantou.

Arguably, the political patriography, as exemplified by Ken Wiwa’s memoir, is a sub-genre of African father writing. The politics of patriography sometimes crosses over into academic discourse: Kwame Anthony Appiah’s noted book, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture concludes

Citation: Olabode Ibironke. CALL FOR PAPERS: THE POLITICS OF AFRICAN PATRIOGRAPHY: WRITING FATHERS IN AFRICAN LITERATURES. H-AfrLitCine. 11-02-2015. https://networks.h-net.org/node/15766/discussions/93785/call-papers-politics-african-patriography-writing-fathers-african Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-AfrLitCine with a revealing chapter about the politics of patrimonial inheritance. And

Manthia Diawara’s acclaimed In Search of Africa begins as an examination of an

African political father figure— Ahmed Sékou Touré. Nelson Mandela is certainly another example of the political figure repositioned as national father, for example in the documentary Mandela: Son of Africa, Father of a Nation.

Binyavanga Wainaina’s reclamation of the mother in One Day I Will Write About

This Place can be read as a gesture against this dominance of father writing.

Hitherto, work that has been done on the representation of fathers has been largely situated within scholarship invested in the term masculinities.

African masculinities have received a particular kind of attention, often intent on the borders between modernities and tradition, the transformation of family and kinship structures, or the recovery of the everyday, the ordinary and the domains of the intimate from the pressing presence of the civic and the public as can be observed in the collection Fathers and Daughters: An Anthology of

Exploration, edited by Ato Quayson.

This/these panel(s) will map new directions in the study of African masculinities, through the lens of the term “fathers” and, vice versa, we will map the study of fathers through the lens of “masculinities.” The panel wants to explore the investment of scholarship in certain meta-narratives about African masculinities and about African fatherhood. “Father” encompasses the biological and familial, but also the symbolic father figures (Tom Mboya, Nelson Mandela,

Jomo Kenyatta, Fela Kuti, Chinua Achebe, Sékou Touré) – in particular those whose deaths sparked enduring myths. We particularly welcome early career scholars, but not exclusively. In the discussions, we intend to reflect on the relationship scholars have to the material, and aim to theorize what a progressive

Citation: Olabode Ibironke. CALL FOR PAPERS: THE POLITICS OF AFRICAN PATRIOGRAPHY: WRITING FATHERS IN AFRICAN LITERATURES. H-AfrLitCine. 11-02-2015. https://networks.h-net.org/node/15766/discussions/93785/call-papers-politics-african-patriography-writing-fathers-african Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-AfrLitCine and revolutionary understanding of the term “father” could be and what fatherhood studies can bring to discussions of feminism, freedom histories, and futurity in African contexts. We hope to build a special issue of Journal of African

Cultural Studies out of this/these panel(s).

Please send abstracts of no more than 500 words to Taiwo Adetunji

Osinubi (tunjitunji_at_yahoo.com) and Carli Coetzee (cc76_at_soas.ac.uk>) by

November 13 with the words “African Patriography” in the subject title of your email. Papers can address all genres of literature and film.