Call for Papers for forthcoming special issue on Contemporary African Novelists in America
Guest editor Simon Lewis is seeking manuscript submissions for a special issue on contemporary African writers who have come to prominence in the United States over the last two decades.
When Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie burst onto the North American publishing scene in 2003, the publication of her brilliant debut novel Purple Hibiscus didn’t just signal the start of a single author’s brilliant career. It also forged a path for a whole new generation of African novelists who had come to America as immigrants or students and who have been mining that experience in their writing. Writers born in Africa who studied at American universities – Teju Cole, Taiye Selasie, Yaa Gyasi, Uzodinma Iweala, NoViolet Bulawayo and Akwaeke Emezi, to name just a few – have followed in Adichie’s footsteps. Purple Hibiscus has been to these writers what Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) was to aspiring Latin American writers during the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s and 1970s, and what Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) was to the proliferation of Indian writers in English from the 1980s on.
In addition to articles analyzing individual authors and/or their work, we warmly invite essays on any of the following themes:
Immigration;
Racism;
Diaspora;
Gender;
Sexuality;
History;
Regionalism;
Education;
Publishing.
Submission Instructions: Manuscripts of c. 5,000 words and following MLA guidelines for formatting should be submitted by September 1, 2024 according to the Journal’s guidelines at https://journals.upress.ufl.edu/jgps
Preliminary ideas and/or complete articles can be submitted to the guest editor at: Simon Lewis, English Department, College of Charleston, LewisS@cofc.edu
Simon Lewis, Department of English, College of Charleston
