Global South Literary Studies

Borderlands, Cultural Hybridity and the African Literariscape

This special issue, “Borderlands, Cultural Hybridity and the African Literariscape”, examines the intersections of border studies, cultural crossings, and literary production in Africa. Using the term literariscape, we conceptualise African literature as a vibrant landscape where borders are not merely geopolitical but also symbolic, linguistic, ecological, and cultural thresholds. The issue aims to analyse how African texts negotiate hybridity, challenge rigid boundaries, and reimagine encounter spaces. The issue also takes interest in the way literary expressions push back against borders imposed or born under the colonial experience. In mapping these changing landscapes, we present the African literariscape as a site of both fracture and creative potential, demonstrating how border thinking enables new interpretations of cultural production and transnational connections. Crucially, this issue extends its focus to consider how the “borders” of African literature rupture and interlink with other Global South literatures, positioning it as a critical nexus within broader South-South dialogues to complicate and enrich the “Global South” as a conceptual category.

We approach borderlands as interstitial zones where identities, cultures, and geographies converge. These may be physical (national boundaries, migratory routes); environmental and maritime (ecological zones, aquatic spaces like the Indian Ocean, where narratives of resource conflict and survival emerge); cultural (sites of confrontation between tradition and colonial modernity); oral (stories and songs that carry memory across imposed boundaries); linguistic/textual (language and discourse as sites of power negotiation); digital (virtual realms for affiliation and resistance); and psychological (internal conflicts and hybrid consciousness shaped by diaspora and return, linking Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas).

This collection seeks to critically examine how African literature encodes, challenges, and transcends these borderlands and how literary texts function as sites where hybrid identities are forged and contested. We invite analyses that treat borders as dynamic spaces of interaction – shaped by history, power, environment, and agency. We are particularly interested in contributions that investigate how African literary border thinking interacts with, extends, or challenges the literature and conceptual frameworks of the wider Global South. How does this engagement prompt us to interrogate the “Global South” as a potentially racialising or politically consolidating category?

The issue aims to contribute to global conversations on migration, transnationalism, postcoloniality and decoloniality by centring African literary perspectives. It will highlight how African writers deploy hybridity and border-thinking as strategies of resistance, innovation, and creative strength.

We welcome contributions exploring, but not limited to, the following themes in relation to African literature and its Global South intersections:

·         Physical/Geographical Borderlands (migration, transnationalism)

·         The Legacy of Arbitrary Borders and Postcolonial Nationalism

·         Linguistic Hybridity and Code-Switching as Literary Strategy

·         Religious Syncretism and Negotiation

·         Identity, Displacement, and Boundary Negotiation

·         Ecological Borderlands and Environmental Imaginaries

·         Hybridity as Resistance and Decolonization

·         Urban and Rural Borderlands

·         Gender and Feminist Perspectives on Borderland Experience

·         Memory, History, and Narrative Reconstruction of Borderlands

·         Generic Hybridity: Oral Traditions and Literary Forms

·         The Digital Borderland: African Literature and Globalization

·         Comparative Borderland Narratives across African Regions

·         African Literature in Indian Ocean Worlds

·         South-South Diasporic Connections (e.g., Africa-Caribbean, Africa-US South)

·         The African Literariscape and the Conceptual Borders of the “Global South”