Social sciences and the humanities are affected by a mobilities turn that foregrounds the social and cultural meanings of mobility practices, systems, and infrastructures. In postcolonial and African literary studies, ‘mobility’ is frequently understood as global migratory movements or as a metaphor thereof. Such an approach tends to focus on the outcomes of mobility instead of mobilities per se, erasing their relationality and the tangible experience of being ‘on the move’. This talk explores the ways in which the mobility studies framework can be combined with postcolonial literary analysis to explore mobilities in African literatures. I focus on Afroeuropean mobilities in Francophone African literary texts from the perspective of specific mobile subjectivities and draw attention to the formal strategies the texts use in their portrayals of mobility.
Dr Anna-Leena Toivanen is an Academy Research Fellow at the University of Eastern Finland. She has published widely on mobility-related themes in African literatures. She is the author of Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms in African and Afrodiasporic Literatures (Brill 2021) and co-editor of Urban Mobilities in Literature and Art Activism (Palgrave, 2024). She is currently editing a special issue on public transport in African literatures (forthcoming in 2024) and working on her second monograph Afroeuropean Mobilities in Francophone African Literatures (Palgrave).
Chair: Birgit Englert
Tuesday, 28th May 2024, 5:15 pm
Department of African Studies - Seminar room 1 and online
Zoom Link: https://univienna.zoom.us/j/63904002477?pwd=UVRFRnp1Y1AvQ0JIL0VBME5URnFsQT09
University Campus, court 5.1., Spitalgasse 2, 1090 Vienna
afrika@univie.ac.at, http://afrika.univie.ac.at
