Hispanophone Africa and Beyond: Colonial Legacies, Anti-Colonial Solidarities and Postcolonial Futures?

Online conference, 12 July 2023, hosted by Northumbria University, with keynotes from Professor Benita Sampedro Vizcaya and Poet Bahia Awah.

2023 marks the 55th anniversary of Equatorial Guinea’s independence from Spain, while we near five decades since Spain’s abandonment of its North African colony Western Sahara, which is still embroiled in an anti-colonial struggle. Spanish remains an official language in both Equatorial Guinea and the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic, and yet the history, politics, and cultural production of these two countries, and that of Morocco where Spain had protectorates until the 1950s, often still remain absent on Hispanic Studies curricula, which – with important exceptions – tend to limit themselves to Spain and Latin America. On the other hand, research on cultural production from North Africa and Equatorial Guinea is currently flourishing, perhaps in part propelled by initiatives such as the International Academic Observatory on Western Sahara (OUISO), the Global Hispanophone rubric, and academic decolonisation efforts more broadly. This conference aims to facilitate a dialogue between scholars, cultural practitioners, and cultural activists working on or from Hispanophone Africa and its diasporas; on the problematics, politics, and potentials of theorising and teaching African cultural production, and Spanish cultural production on Africa, within, or perhaps beyond, or outside, the disciplinary confines of Hispanic Studies. Potential topics might include the following:

Potential topics might include the following:

• Teaching: Pedagogy; anti-racism in the classroom; decolonising the
  curriculum; reflections on teaching Saharawi, Moroccan, Equatoguinean and
  other African literatures in Spanish, as well as their oral traditions, in the
  classroom; the role of teaching in preserving cultural identities, and in offering
  anti-colonial solidarity.
• Hispanic Studies beyond Spanish language: cultural production from
  Western Sahara, Morocco, and Equatorial Guinea in, for example, Arabic,
  Hassaniya, Fang, Ndowé, or Bubi and its place in Hispanic Studies; alternative
  configurations for the study of Saharawi, Equatoguinean, or Moroccan cultures
  beyond the discipline of Hispanic Studies.
• The politics of culture: cultural activism; the political roles of translation,
  publishing, film festivals, and other forms of cultural dissemination; cultural
  practitioners as ambassadors for political causes; the role of culture in settler
  colonialism and neocolonial practices; the maintenance of cultural identity in
  anti-colonial struggles.
• Theorising Africa’s place within the Global Hispanophone: Literature, oral
  and cultural traditions, visual, plastic and performing arts of Equatorial Guinea,
  Morocco and Western Sahara; representations of Africa and its peoples in
  (current day or historical) Spanish literature, visual arts and media; colonial
  legacies in Hispanophone Africa’s cultural production.