Online conference

2023 marks the 55th anniversary of Equatorial Guinea’s independence from Spain, while we near five decades since Spain’s abandonment of its North African colony Western Sahara, which is still embroiled in an anti-colonial struggle. Spanish remains an official language in both Equatorial Guinea and the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic, and yet the history, politics, and cultural production of these two countries, and that of Morocco where Spain had protectorates until the 1950s, often still remain absent on Hispanic Studies curricula, which – with important exceptions – tend to limit themselves to Spain and Latin America. On the other hand, research on cultural production from North Africa and Equatorial Guinea is currently flourishing, perhaps in part propelled by initiatives such as the International Academic Observatory on Western Sahara (OUISO), the Global Hispanophone rubric, and academic decolonisation efforts more broadly. This conference aims to facilitate a dialogue between scholars, cultural practitioners, and cultural activists working on or from Hispanophone Africa and its diasporas ; on the problematics, politics, and potentials of theorising and teaching African cultural production, and Spanish cultural production on Africa, within, or perhaps beyond, or outside, the disciplinary confines of Hispanic Studies.