This panel looks at the literary and cultural work of African women in the Sahel as important places for voice, survival, and political imagination in a region that has a lot of colonial history, environmental problems, language barriers, and ongoing instability. The panel brings together research on women’s writing from Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Niger, Mauritania, and Senegal. It shows that Sahelian women are not just witnesses to history, but also intellectual agents who actively shape regional stories, cultural practices, and ways of resisting. The panel asks: How do Sahelian women writers, storytellers, playwrights, and cultural producers talk about voice, mobility, and belonging in places where there is a lot of violence, insecurity, and forced silence? How do women take back control of the story in places where men and elite institutions have long controlled political discourse and cultural legitimacy? What aesthetic strategies do women use when they deal with oral and written traditions, local and colonial languages, and the differences between expressing themselves as individuals and as a group? How might Homi Bhabha’s concept of the “third space,” understood as a liminal site of cultural negotiation (54-55), help us interpret these practices of negotiation and creativity? Using feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial ideas, the panel looks at the Sahel as a borderless and transregional space where gendered experiences and aesthetic practices move across borders. Contributors examine contemporary literature and cinema, diasporic writing, oral traditions, language politics, translation, testimony, and digital archival practices. By positioning Sahelian women’s voices as essential to understanding the region’s cultural, political, and imaginative life, this volume intervenes in Francophone African studies, gender scholarship, and Sahel studies. We welcome contributions from scholars at all career stages working on women’s cultural production in any Sahelian context.
Submit 200-words abstracts and brief bio to mdafong@crimson.ua.edu and doariyo@crimson.edu deadline: March 12 2026.
Voices from the Sahel: Women Building Archives of Memory and Futurity
