The Dakar Translation Symposium: Africa and Her Diasporas
In the hope of fostering a transatlantic dialogue, The Dakar Translation Symposium: Africa and its Diasporas brought together speakers and participants across four continents and four languages as a collaborative effort between the following institutions: Rutgers University, NYU Abu Dhabi, The University of Assane Seck University in Ziguinchor and Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, where the symposium was held from June 14 to June 19, 2022.
This symposium was the first multinational, multidisciplinary, multilingual conference focused on the African diaspora. Panels captured the value of connected stories through multiple themes such as reconnecting identities, gender and diversity, nationhood, Black Lives Matter, and more, culminating in a Juneteenth memorial gathering on Gorée Island, the largest slave trading port on the African coast from the 15th to the 19th century.
The Symposium also served to raise awareness and funds to support a collaborative Center for Translation Studies, Literature and Writing at Assane Seck University in Ziguinchor, which is in southern Senegal, and located at the crossroads of French, English and Portuguese regions superimposed on half a dozen local languages and their resulting creoles.
The Symposium explored the following themes:
- Counternarratives and Translating History;
- The (Diasporic) Language of Hip-Hop;
- 1619 and the Birth of Modernity;
- Poetry of the Black Atlantic;
- BLM and the Afterlives of Negritude;
- Creolization and creoleness;
- Creolization and Cultural Globalization;
- Creolization and the Diasporas;
- The Retrieval of African Indigenous Knowledge Systems;
- Superdiversity and the Complexities of New Migration Streams;
- Cultural and Linguistic Continuity and Changes;
- Ethnicity, Class, Gender, and Diversity in Africa and the Diasporas;
- Cultural Global Perspective: Africa and the Diasporas from the Inside and the Outside;
- The Postcolonial Configurations of North/South, West/ East, First World/Second World/Third World;
- New Communication Media and Technologies, New and Hybrid Cultural Forms and Practices, and Globalized Economies in Africa and the Diasporas;
- Hegemony, Politics and Economy in Africa and the Diasporas;
- Terrorism and the New Challenges of Security and Peace in Africa and the Diasporas;
- Centrality, Marginality, and the Human Conditions;
- Post-coloniality and Euro-Americanism in World Politics, Economy and Culture;
- Geopolitics and The Postcolonial: Reshaping North-South Cooperation;
- Reshaping the Africa-Diasporas Relations;
- (Post)Coloniality, Cultural and Civilizational Reconstruction in Africa and the Diasporas;
- Rethinking Negritude and Pan-Africanism.
Sessions were live-streamed daily on Youtube and the entire Symposium program and archive can be accessed here.
