The creative output of Africans living in Europe has in recent years received increasing interest from the media and in academia. No doubt, the recent riots in France point once more to the need to reflect critically on Euro-African social realities at the beginning of the new millennium. In the literary and cultural sphere, voices of protest resound in a less violent but no less provocative manner, though they not necessarily have received the same public attention as the best-selling life narratives Slave by the Sudanese author Mende Nazer and Desert Flower by the Somali Waris Dirie. Also in academia, journals, workshops and conferences have been dedicated to related issues, such as the historical dimensions of Euro-African encounters and their present-day socio-political repercussions, intercultural communication in Europe today, and perspectives and problems of Euro-African cultural productions.

Although these events illustrate the topicality of (artistic explorations of) Euro-African transculturalities, little critical attention has been paid to the manner in which the narrative modes in Euro-African works give expression to or are an expression of their creators’ transcultural realities. Our conference TRANSCULTURAL MODERNITIES: NARRATING AFRICA IN EUROPE seeks to respond to this lack of reflection on the modes of narration and aims to scrutinize how Africans in Europe in their creative work explores issues such as home, migration, and diaspora, and how these creative explorations in turn contribute to the emergence of specific modern realities which are always strongly influenced by gender, class and ethnicity. The notion of transculturality draws attention to cultural performances in the wake of globalisation and the diffusion of traditional identities. The conference therefore examines how issues of gender, class and ethnicity as well as the respective social practices affect the self-perception and description of Euro-African cultural and social identities. In order to challenge the commonly accepted understanding of a Eurocentric description of identity formations, we have deliberately chosen to switch around the more commonly used term “Afro-European” and use the term “Euro-African” instead.

As we stipulate in our Call for Papers, our conference aims to bring together researchers from different areas such as cultural and literary studies, anthropology and narratology, for an extensive interdisciplinary and translinguistic exchange. This scholarly border-crossing is particularly relevant in the field of African studies, which too often remains divided not only in terms of disciplines (anthropology, literature, etc…) but also linguistically (anglophone, francophone, etc…) as well as regionally (Nigerian, Sub-Saharan, East-African).