Conference 2025 Schedule Day 1

Please visit the registration table upon arrival. 

Light breakfast items will be available. 

This panel brings together interdisciplinary explorations of feminist and anticolonial narratives, emphasizing the power of storytelling to reclaim identities and resist historical erasures. 

Panel Chair & Discussant: Sangeeta Ray, Faculty Director, The Center for Literary + Comparative Studies; Professor, English and Comparative Literature; Affiliate Faculty, Harriet Tubman Dept. of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Maryland

Panelists:

• Elizabeth Abena Osei, PhD Student, English, University of Maryland - "Refuse, Re-use, Recycle: A feminist reading of the repurposing of Old Nollywood through Meme-fication"
• Rashi Maheshwari, PhD Student, Comparative Literature, University of Maryland - "Narrating the Self: African American Women’s Autobiographies as Acts of Decolonial Knowledge Production"
• Abhinav Bhardwaj, PhD Student, English, University of Maryland - "Anticolonial Self-Recreations: Reading Sylvia Wynter’s Black Metamorphoses and Bhagat Singh’s Jail Notebook"
• Shakiba Sharifpour, PhD Student, Comparative Literature, University of Maryland - "Translating Feminism: Womanhood and Race in the Farsi Translations of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Works"

Since the 1994 genocide, global discussions about Rwanda have become increasingly polarized. For some, the government’s efforts to promote unity and reconciliation and combat “genocide ideology” are evidence of Paul Kagame’s visionary leadership. For many others, Rwanda’s post-genocide transformation has come at a cost (and is perhaps somewhat illusory). Critical scholars argue that the regime’s tight control over public discourse has led to a “rehearsed consensus” on sensitive topics (Ingelaere) and a “politicized epistemic space” for research (Purdeková)—though debates remain about the extent of the state’s power and the resilience of perspectives from below. In this roundtable, our goal is to revisit and further dissect these complexities of contemporary knowledge production in/on Rwanda, but in a way that might transcend the usual patterns of debate—for example, thinking beyond the binary of state repression and obedience/resistance or, in the realm of expression, of “public” vs. “hidden transcripts” (Scott). Moreover, given that it is non-Rwandans who still tend to dominate both the research landscape and the production of scholarship about Rwanda, we also wish to reflect on the politics of expertise in our field and the calls for a “pluralization” of voices within Rwanda Studies (Rutazibwa).

Roundtable Chair: Erin Mosely, Assistant Professor, History, University of Maryland

Participants:

• Claudine Kuradusenge-McLeod, Chair, Department of Peace, Human Rights & Cultural Relations, American University
• Zoë Berman, Postdoctoral Fellow, Michigan Society of Fellows, University of Michigan
• Richard Benda, Tutor, Centre for Black Theology, The Queen's Foundation
• Samuel Shearer, Assistant Professor, Department of African and African American Studies, Washington University in St. Louis
• Fiacre Bienvenu, Independent Scholar

While lunch will only be available for a limited group, we invite attendees to pack or bring their lunch for some lunchtime conversation with other attendees. 

Conference attendees can visit one of the many dining options at Stamp Student Union for lunch. There is also a cafe on the first floor of H.J. Patterson (Samovar), as well as various other dining options near HJP and around campus.

We invite all conference attendees to enjoy the snacks and beverages available throughout the conference.

Moderator: Heba Ghannam, PhD Candidate, Anthropology; Adjunct Faculty, Critical Race and Gender Studies, American University

Presenters:

• Valérie Orlando, Professor, French and Francophone Literatures, University of Maryland - “Feminist Agency in the ‘Everyday’ of Contemporary Morocco: Myopia (Sana Akroud, 2019)”
• Soubeika Bahri, Lecturer, Applied Linguistics, University of Massachusetts Boston - “North Africa: an arena of negotiating new names and contesting colonial ones for the recognition of the region's Amazighity”
• Gabriel Opare, PhD Student, Applied Linguistics and Language Education, University of Maryland - “Ujamaa Discursivity: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Tweets by Ghanaian Youth in the 2024 Presidential Elections”
• Rahma Maccarone, Recent PhD Graduate, Spanish Literature, Georgetown University - “Afro-Islamic Diasporic Countercultures: West African Muslim Writers in the Americas”
• Día Joy Wright, PhD Candidate, Anthropology, American University - “Necrographic Divination: The Resistive Practices & Poetics of Black Queer Ethnography, Necromancy, & Community Care”

Moderator: Lahra Smith, Associate Professor and Director, African Studies, Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University

Presenters:

• Leopoldino Jeronimo, PhD Student, Political Science, Claremont Graduate University - “Reclaiming Identity and Language: Decolonial Pathways and Cultural Resilience in Mozambique”
• Yasser Essa, Independent Scholar - “Resisting Epistemic Coloniality: The Endurance of Colonial Legacies and the Complexities of Decolonization in Sudan”
• Mahamadou Samsoudine Sadio, Chairman of the Board of National School of Arts (Senegal); African and Postcolonial Studies Laboratory, Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar-Senegal; Freelance Lecturer - “Regional Governance and Political Autonomy: Analyzing State Agency in Southern Senegambia”
• Claudine Kuradusenge-McLeod, Professorial Lecturer, School of International Service, American University - “The 1994 Genocide: A Comparative Discussion between Academy and Rwandans in the Diaspora”
• Juan Martin Dabezies, Associate Research Professor, Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland; Adjunct Professor, University of the Republic, Uruguay - “Archaeology of Afrodescendant Communities in Rural Uruguay”
• Tavis Mansfield, PhD Candidate, Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland - “Stranded Asset Debt: Africa's Dependency on Fossil Fuels”

Keynote Speaker: Kwame Edwin Otu, Associate Professor, African Studies, Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University

Drawing on his recent work conducted among e-waste workers in Agbogbloshie and Sodom and Gomorrah, Dr. Otu's talk will illuminate how colonial configurations of power and dispossession are reproduced by the Ghanaian nation-state in its e-waste workers, who simultaneously embody and contend with the “slow violence” at the core of this postcolonial nation-state. These workers’ exposure to toxic fumes from burning obsolete technology paradoxically conceals and makes visible the necropolitical matrix that is the postcolonial nation-state. Thus, colonial inhalation articulates how the rhythms of breathing are adjudicated in this postcolonial nation-state. To this end, Dr. Otu's talk brings Frantz Fanon’s notion of “combat breathing” in conversation with the Ghanaian writer, Amu Djoleto’s novelization of the “vampire state” in his book Money Galore and ties these interventions with “Wasteman,” a song by the Ghanaian rapper, Black Sherif, to explain how the postcolony recalibrates logics of extraction and deposition.

Join us at the Global Crossroads Atrium (H.J. Patterson, 1st floor) for light refreshments.