From Migritude to Fémigritude: African Women Writers Theorizing Migration and Displacement
Inspired by Jacques Chevrier's concept of migritude, which designates literary writing centered on migration and its displacements, this panel proposes the concept of Fémigritude as a theorectical framework for reading African women's literary and cultural representations of migration, and displacement. Building on Filomina Chioma Steady's theory of African feminism as rooted in material conditions of survival and extending the legacy of Négritude through a gendered lens, fémigritude names the epistemological interventions emerging from African women’s narratives of migration. This panel invites African women writers and filmmakers, whose works examine how migration restructures kinship networks, transforms motherhood into a site of political vulnerability, exposes women and children to state and structural violence, and compels women to navigate intersecting systems of oppression. These cultural productions theorize migration not as an individual tragedy, but as a structural condition shaped by necropolitics, border regimes, neoliberal precarity, climate insecurity, terrorism, and global inequality. These cultural works see migration as a structural situation influenced by necropolitics, border regimes, insecurity, terrorism, and global inequity. We welcome papers engaging literature, film, autobiography, testimony, performance, and other forms of cultural production written by African women that portray African women’s experiences of migration, displacement, survival, resistance and agency.
Keywords: Migritude, fémigritude, migration, displacement, necropolitics
Please send abstracts of 250–300 words and a short bio to Diweng M. Dafong at
mdafong@crimson.ua.edu
