From petition to forum: fifty years of African literatures at the MLA

This paper tracks the fifty-year institutional evolution of African literary studies at the Modern Language Association of America. Beginning in 1965 as precarious “Conferences” requiring annual petitions, the field achieved permanent “Division status” in 1976. The paper explores formative intellectual and racial tensions, including debates over organizing African literature purely on a geographical basis as opposed to a larger diasporic orientation, and it charts the birth and growth of the African Literature Association as a specialist organization dedicated to the field. Later developments at the MLA included the 2016 shift to a “Forum” structure, where scholars successfully contested a proposed geographical partition in favor of a chronological split at 1990. Over the past decade, the field has moved from its marginal beginnings toward a robust presence, fostering global alliances with fields like Environmental Humanities and the Global South.