2024 Thematic Conference of the China-Africa Language and Culture Comparative Studies Committee and Symposium on "African (Diasporic) Literature from the Perspective of Global History"
Date and Venue: 31 August to 1 September 2024, Taiyuan, Shanxi, China
Brief Summary
Convened in Taiyuan from 31 August to 1 September 2024, this thematic meeting was organized by the China-Africa Language and Culture Comparative Studies Committee and jointly hosted by the School of Foreign Languages, the Kafka and Comparative Literature Research Center, and the School of Philosophy at Shanxi University. The conference gathered more than 100 scholars from across China for intensive discussion of African and African diaspora literature within the wider framework of global history. The agenda covered a broad range of topics, including African and diasporic writing in relation to the global history of capitalism and colonialism, abolitionist movements, twentieth-century wars, Third World movements, decolonization, African independence, world literature, language policy, and China-Africa area studies. Eleven keynote speeches addressed both classical and emerging issues in the field. Presentations examined colonial discourse and African modernization, the worldliness of African literature, cosmopolitan thought, Fanon and revolutionary politics, African American nonfiction travel writing, race and Black phenomenology, Toni Morrison’s aesthetics, Ben Okri’s postcolonial ecological imagination, and albinism writing in Angolan literature, among other topics. A notable theme was the integration of new technologies into literary research and translation, including discussion of AI-assisted work in African and African diaspora literary studies.
The conference also featured six group sessions on nationalism and cosmopolitanism, African American and Black British literature, narrative and theory, language and culture, race criticism, and identity. A roundtable forum titled "Dialoguing with Different Literary Worlds" further deepened scholarly exchange by bringing multiple senior scholars into direct conversation. At the closing ceremony, the organizers summarized the meeting around three major lines of inquiry: African and diasporic literature in the perspective of regional and area studies, comparative scholarship across Chinese and international contexts, and AI-enabled literary research and translation. As the official journal of the association, Frontiers of African Diaspora Studies is closely aligned with these concerns, and this conference vividly reflects the journal’s commitment to intellectually rigorous, globally connected, and methodologically innovative scholarship.
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