Call for Papers: ‘English Studies in Africa’ Special Issue: The Beat Generation and Africa

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English in Studies in Africa invites contributions to a special issue, ‘The Beat Generation and Africa’ guest edited by Eva Kowalska and A. Robert Lee.

Over the last few decades, scholarly work on the Beat Generation writers has become increasingly transnational, comparative, and inclusive of work on authors from outside of the core canon of Beat literature, and well beyond the USA. Writers with Beat affinities in terms of actual points of contact, as well as with shared stylistic and thematic concerns, are being included in the dialogue of Beat studies. Scholars from all over the world, including South Africa and Africa, are more involved than ever in producing new research on the Beat Generation, as well as teaching Beat literature.

Africa has specific links to the Beat Generation, thus far mostly explored through the place of Tangier in the work of Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac and others, and through the presence of Sinclair Beiles at the Beat Hotel and in the cut-up collaborations of Burroughs and Gysin. But Africa as place and as construct plays a larger part in the Beat imaginary, which has a strong affinity for jazz, and especially in the work of African American Beat writers such as Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman and Ted Joans, for whom it is imbued with historical and personal significance.

We invite contributions by local and international academics and independent scholars around the broad theme of ‘The Beat Generation and Africa’. Possible areas of enquiry might include, but are not limited to

  • Correspondence between the Beats and African writers, Beat contributions to African publications, African writers publishing on Beat platforms
  • African Beats in Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone Africa
  • Constructs and representations of Africa in Beat writing
  • Case studies of African writers with Beat affiliations or sensibilities, for instance Jensma, Gwala, Mrabet, Choukri and others
  • Comparative work on Beat and African writers
  • Reading/researching/teaching the Beats in Africa
  • Beat and African issues of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity
  • Beat and African music and indigenous art and literary forms
  • Beat and the politics of Africa – colour line, colonialism, press freedom.

Abstracts of around 300 words should be submitted by email to eva.kowalska748@gmail.com and to arobertlee24@gmail.com no later than 30 September 2024; subsequently manuscripts of up to 7000 words we need to receive by 31 March 2025, followed by peer review and an expected publication date of May 2026.

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