CALL FOR PAPERS: “Ambivalent Realisms in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century African and Black Diasporic Writing.”

CALL FOR PAPERS: “Ambivalent Realisms in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century African and Black Diasporic Writing.”

Guest editors: Sylvana Baugh, University of Toronto and Alex Charles Valin, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

In a 1983 interview, Toni Morrison states, “I have become indifferent, I suppose, to the phrase ‘magical realism.’” Here Morrison responds to critics using “magical realism” to describe moments in her work that strain the limits of novelistic realism by resisting the description and identifying magical realism as a Latin American writing practice distinct from her own. And yet, by Morrison’s own admission, her novels contain elements of magic. In the same time period, in Zimbabwe, Dambudzo Marechera writes “[r]ealism pretends to be able to say the truth about life. I'm not against truth, but it can be sought by different routes.” Marechera’s different routes were often described as modernist, but like Morrison, Marechera resists straightforwardly transposing a term from one location (Europe) onto another (Africa). This guest-edited issue seeks to explore literary works by African, African American, and Afro-diasporic writers that trouble the limits of the real and interrogate the formal or generic terms that previous critics have used to describe those experiments.

Black literature, across a multitude of geographies and temporalities, has been called upon to represent the “real” – the real lived experience of Black peoples, often under subjugation, in its sorrow and joy–  and there has been an expectation that Black writing (from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas) adhere to a realist representation of Black struggle. However, there have always been experimental writers who pushed back against realism’s limits, and this turn away from (or looking beyond) realism has endured into the twenty-first century.

We seek to engage with the questions of what lies between realism, magical realism, and surrealism – how we might rethink authors’ complex relationships to realism and what concepts we might use to describe the results. We invite literary scholars to draw from a wide-ranging theoretical lens that might bring together studies of formal realism or the history of the novel with anticolonial theory or literary and cultural studies of Africa and its diasporas. Labels like “realism” and “modernism” do not quite capture the syncretic work colonized authors perform because these authors inherited colonial forms and deployed them in the service of independence movements. Similarly, the term “magical realism” can be limiting because of its focus on magic: African and Black diasporic authors disrupt realism in myriad ways that include and do not include the magical. Whether their work is classified as surreal or Afro-surreal, or something else entirely, these authors contend with histories and traumas that exceed realist representation.

We invite papers that investigate the ambivalent realisms that have characterized Black literary production. Here is a list of questions that scholars interested in submitting articles to this special issue might consider?

• What are the limitations of terms like “magical realism,” “modernism,” and “surrealism” when it comes to classifying Black literary texts?
• How do Black writers uncover the limitations of realism to reflect on conditions of modernity and post-modernity?
• How might methodologies such as Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation reframe ambivalent realist works in the 20th and 21st century?
• How have Black authors extended or rejected eighteenth- and nineteenth-century challenges to realist modes of representation?
• In what ways do diasporic and African authors take up African oral traditions as part of their experimentation?
• Do experiments in ambivalent realism reflect a turn (or return) to African roots, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. argues, or something else?
• How does turning away from realism better capture histories of enslavement and colonization than a realist treatment might? 
• How have Black writers addressed or dismissed connections between realism and “authenticity”?
• Are there connections between ambivalent realism and contemporary philosophical developments?
• How do writers of ambivalent realist fiction employ other genres and media within their work, such as poetry, music, visual art, film?
• What are the possibilities for ambivalent realist fiction in the contemporary digital world?

Please submit an abstracts of around 300 words and a short bio to avalin2@unl.edu and s.baugh@mail.utoronto.ca by June 30, 2025.