Convener: Femi Eromosele (Comparative Literature, Utrecht University) e.f.eromosele@uu.nl
This stream explores the role of narrative in the experience and definition of illness in Africa. As a fundamental instrument for framing experience, narrative provides a language for the body and addresses social, cultural and political practices frequently overlooked by biomedical approaches to illness. Narrative is, however, hardly a neutral instrument. It is shaped by medium, genre, and cultural imperatives that extend beyond the producer. It can reinforce relations of power and be deployed in service of resistance. This stream invites proposals that reflect on the ways African writers and cultural producers imaginatively convey or contend with what it means to be sick or well.
panels and papers should address one or more of the following themes:
· Illness and identity in Africa
· Narrative, patient experience, and biomedical power
· Illness, embodiment, and affect
· Pandemics, infectious diseases, and African cultural production
· Illness and new digital genres
· Idioms of health and explanatory models of illness in Africa.
· Illness and the limits of narrative
Please contact e.f.eromosele@uu.nl if you plan to submit an abstract/panel to this stream
Motivation
This stream contributes to the conference theme by addressing a significant domain where the role of narrative is both vital and contested. Although illness and its frequent companions, morbidity and death, permeate many studies of African life worlds, the imbrication of narrative with this state is scarcely the subject of discussion. With the dominance of medical and anthropological perspectives on notions of health, conversations around stories of illness tend to be isolated and dispersed amongst scholars working across disciplinary fields such as disability studies, postcolonial studies, social work, etc. This stream hopes to convene scholars who work primarily with representational texts but also with other forms of cultural production. As evident in the abstract prompts, narrative is envisioned as implicated in the way illness is understood, in the modes of identity that it affirms and/or prohibits, and in the relations of power it contests or upholds. These are essential points in the conference theme.
