This panel invites proposals for studies of the democratic process of creative self-making and popular culture focused on Igbo communities. It also welcomes proposals for papers grounded in an attentiveness to Igbo mobilities and urbanity. Recognizing that Igbo identities, individual and collective, are not stagnant but shaped by the past and driven by promises of (or anticipation for) the future, this call seeks papers that offer answers to any of the following questions: what meaning can we infer from enactments of Igbo cultural transformations made manifest through language, visual, sonic, and literary arts, as well as other forms of artistic expression? With identity formation in flux, what kinds of re/imagining and re/defining of Igbo subjectivities are possible? How might we fruitfully engage with emergent Igbo ethno-national self-fashioning narratives and their urban-space-specific implications? How might we understand the interplay between geographic specificity, ethno-national identity, and oral expressions of agency and belonging? How do these communities use language, idiom, music, art, and narrative to apprehend the tangled networks of precarity wrought through sociopolitical unrest, economic instability, and climate and environment insecurities? How do nostalgia, haunting, and the fluidity of space and time produce ruptures, thickening the present with matter from the past? How does the past imbricate the present and future, and how do Igbo people leverage this thickening of time for their own self and place making? We seek contributions eager to explore contemporary and emergent Igbo identity formation through these lenses. We welcome interdisciplinary methodologies and approaches to engaging with these questions.
For submissions, please send a 200-250-word abstract and a short bio to Ivana Uzoh (ivana.uzoh@yale.edu) and Comfort Azubuko-Udah (comfort.udah@utoronto.ca) by March 10, 2025.
