Stream convenor: Dr Njoki Wamai nwamai@usiu.ac.ke and njokiwamai@gmail.com
This stream interrogates the contested terrains of transitional justice and memory-making in post-violence African contexts. Across the continent, official narratives of reconciliation, healing, and justice often clash with grassroots and embodied accounts of trauma, resistance, and memory. Whether through truth commissions, reparations programs, memorials- transitional justice mechanisms attempt to shape collective memory and national identity from the state. Yet, these top-down efforts frequently marginalize alternative voices of survivors, communities, and activists whose stories resist closure and challenge dominant scripts.
We invite papers that explore how narrative power operates in the aftermath of violence: Who gets to tell the story of what happened? Whose pain is recognized, and whose is silenced? Whose pain is remembered and memorialised by the state? How do communities contest or reframe imposed narratives through art, ritual, oral history, digital media, or activism? How do gender, age/generation, race/ethnicity, and geography shape the politics of memory?
This stream hopes to bring together scholars working across disciplines including anthropology, history, law, literature, political science, and cultural studies to examine case studies from diverse African contexts, including post-conflict societies, transitional regimes, and spaces of ongoing structural violence. We especially welcome contributions that foreground localised forms of transitional justice, resistance and everyday forms of memory.
By centering narrative as a site of struggle, this stream contributes to the broader conference theme by revealing how African worlds are made and remade through contested memories and justice claims. It seeks to foster critical conversations on the politics of remembering violence and the futures such remembering makes possible.
Panels inspired by this stream could focus on and but not limited to: Narrative Resistance from below on how survivors and victims resist state and national narratives of transitional justice; Survivor and victim narratives and counter narratives, gendered narratives and silences in post conflict story telling; oral traditions as sites of memory.
