Professor Alain Mabanckou and Professor Ainehi Edoro will headline the African Literature Association 2026 annual conference.

The event themed New Horizons in African Literatures and Film: Cityscapes, Mediascapes, and Ideoscapes is scheduled for May 28-30 at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The pairing brings together one of contemporary francophone African literature’s most celebrated novelists and a leading voice in digital African literary culture, signaling the conference’s engagement with both established literary traditions and emerging platforms shaping how African literature circulates globally.

Mabanckou, a French citizen born in the Republic of the Congo, teaches literature at UCLA’s Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies. His novels and non-fiction depicting contemporary Africa and the African diaspora in France have earned him recognition as among the most prominent Franco-African writers in the francophone sphere. His accolades include the Prix Renaudot 2006 for Mémoires de porc-épic, the Grand prix littéraire d’Afrique noire for Bleu-Blanc-Rouge (1999), the Prix des cinq continents de la francophonie 2005 for Verre cassé, and the Académie Française’s Grand Prix de littérature Henri Gal 2012 for his entire body of work. He was also a 2015 Man Booker International Prize finalist and 2016 Puterbaugh Fellow.

Edoro is a Mellon Morgridge Assistant Professor jointly appointed in the English and African Cultural Studies departments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and founder and editor of Brittle Paper, a major news platform shaping African literary culture. Her first book Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think was published by Columbia University Press in January 2026. Her scholarship explores how stories—in novels and on social media—present new ways of thinking about worldmaking, with recent publications including “Unruly Archives: Literary Form and the Social Media Imaginary” (ELH, 2022) and “Mediated Ancestrality: Mariama Bâ, Instagram, and the Poetics of Fragmentation” (PMLA, 2025). An Okay Africa and New Africa Magazine top 100 honoree, Edoro’s work has appeared in The Guardian, Africa is a Country, Lit Hub, BBC World News, and SABC.

The conference theme examines African literature’s evolution from “village text” to New Diasporic writing, exploring how African literary production moves across rural and urban spaces, continental and diasporic contexts, oral and written forms, and analogue and digital mediums. The selection of Mabanckou and Edoro as keynote speakers reflects this thematic focus: Mabanckou’s fiction bridges African and French literary traditions while depicting diasporic experiences, while Edoro’s scholarship examines how digital platforms transform African literary culture and readership. Together, they represent different generations and approaches to thinking about African literature’s global reach and technological mediation.

The 2026 ALA conference continues the association’s tradition of bringing together scholars, writers, and literary professionals to examine developments in African literatures and film. Registration is currently open, and can be completed here.