On the African Intellectual Mobilities Colloquium

Rebecca Jones ‘We need new critical paradigms’: Reflections on researching a literary history of Yoruba travel writing’ © Imke van Heerden

Finding Africa is delighted to have had the opportunity to co-host and participate in the recent colloquium of African Intellectual Mobilities at the University of York. Centred around a questioning and broadening of the travel writing genre and the movements of writers, the colloquium registered the significance and extent of travel writing by African and black diaspora authors and intellectuals. Such a revisiting of the genre reveals the potential for research that seeks to reposition travel and the many types of texts and voices that have been marginalised within this tradition of writing.

African Intellectual Mobilities: Colloquium Programme – 7 February 2015

PROGRAMME #AfriMobilities

Sponsored by Routledge

African Intellectual Mobilities: Diasporic Travel and Texts, Past and Present

Saturday 7 February 2015, 9:00am–5:30; The Treehouse, Humanities Research Centre, University of York

Submit an Abstract & Register Online! Colloquium: African Intellectual Mobilities at the University of York

African Intellectual Mobilities: Diasporic Travel and Texts, Past and Present

Saturday 7 February 2015, 9:00am–5:30pm & wine reception

The Treehouse, Humanities Research Centre, University of York 

Featuring a reading by and interview with Noo Saro-Wiwa, acclaimed author of Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria, who is working on her second book;

A keynote by Dr Alasdair Pettinger, editor of pioneering anthology Always Elsewhere: Travels of the Black Atlantic, on the mid-19th-century travels and writings of African-American visitors to Britain and Ireland, Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, and how they might be read in relation to other black travel accounts and articulations. Tim Youngs, editor of Studies in Travel Writing, will respond.