Call for Papers

The COVID-19 pandemic, an event of global magnitude characterised by extraordinary media coverage, was but one among many epidemic events throughout human history. Societies react and deal with epidemic phenomena with a degree of heterogeneity determined by different material and cultural contexts. Outbreaks penetrate people’s daily lives and the folds of society to a greater or lesser degree: they require new or reinvented vocabulary, enter into conversational exchange, stimulate new types of literary and video-musical production, and are the subject of negotiation between “modern” and “traditional”  medical-scientific practices.

Global epidemics like HIV/AIDS, endemic diseases like malaria or Lassa fever, the occasional outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease, as well as the more recent COVID-19 pandemic, have marked the African continent in many different ways and in different epochs. Alongside the purely epidemiological aspects, these events have become the thematic focus of a prolific cultural response conveyed by the media, social media, social interaction, and cultural practices. This response, naturally heterogeneous and complex, has found aesthetic codification (e.g. in literary production and the verbal arts) and linguistic-conceptual codification (e.g., with the creation of neologisms and the metaphoric conceptualisation of epidemic discourse), and is also part of the ideological fabric that sees modern and pre-modern instances contrasting and integrating each other.

The OUTBREAKS! conference intends to focus the discussion on how African societies have experienced, integrated, and interpreted the pandemic phenomena of recent decades in artistic-literary production, language remodelling or adaptation, and cultural negotiation in the medical-curative domain.

We invite paper proposals concerning epidemic outbreaks across African cultures and languages from the disciplinary perspectives of literatures & verbal arts, linguistics, and cultural studies & anthropology. A list of possible topics includes (but is not limited to) the following:

• metaphorical conceptualisation of epidemic phenomena;
• the language of epidemics: innovations and adaptations;
• epidemics and linguistics landscape;
• epidemics in literature, arts and music;
• indigenous/local medical understandings of epidemics;
• traditional medicinal practices and epidemics;
• epidemics in religious discourse;
• epidemic discourse in social media;
• epidemics: education, infotainment, and infodemic;

Abstract submission
Abstracts in English or French should be sent to outbreaks2023@gmail.com by 1 June 2023. The abstract files (pdf and doc/docx) will include: author’s name, affiliation, short bio (max 120 words), e-mail address, (surface) mailing address, title of the paper, and abstract (maximum 500 words, including references).

Selected bibliography
Agwuocha, U. A. 2021. Conceptual metaphors in COVID-19 pandemic discourses in the Nigerian print media communication. Research in Pragmatics, 2(2), 39-62.
Amfani, Ahmed Alliru & Ibrahim garba (eds.). 2017. English-Hausa Glossary of HIV, AIDS and Ebola-Related Terms, Ibadan: University Press.
Atanda, O. and Bamgbose, G. 2022. A contrastive analysis of COVID-19 English-Yoruba lexicon. LASU Journal of African Studies, 10(2), 1-12.
Bamgbose, G. 2023. Musical intervention in Coronavirus pandemic: A pragmatic analysis of Wasiu Alabi Pasuma’s Corona Be Gone. Journal of Applied Language and Culture Studies, 6(1): 1-22
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2021. Metaphors of Coronavirus. Invisible Enemy or Zombie Apocalypse?, London: Palgrave Macmillan Cham.
Chimuanya, Lily and Elias Ebuka Igwebuike. 2021. “From COVID-19 to COVID-666: Quasi-religious mentality and ideologies in Nigerian coronavirus pandemic discourse”, Journal of African Media Studies 13 (3)¬: 399-416.
Cinelli, Matteo, Walter Quattrociocchi, Alessandro Galeazzi, Carlo Michele Valensise, Emanuele Brugnoli, Ana Lucia Schmidt, Paola Zola, Fabiana Zollo & Antonio Scala. 2020. “The COVID-19 social media infodemic”, Scientific Reports 10 (16598), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-73510-5
Danja, Muhammad Ibrahim, & Nura Ibrahim. Infotainment During Pandemic: An Analysis of Gidan Badamasi Television Drama of Arewa 24, Hemispheres 36: 99-108.
Du Toit, Brian M., and Ismail H. Abdallah. 1985. African Healing Strategies. London: Trado-Medic Books.
Jinju, Muhammadu Hambali. 1990. Maganin gargajiya na Afirka : tare da mai da karfi a kan nazarin itatuwan magani na Hausa da warkarwa [=African traditional medicine: with an emphasis on the study of Hausa medicinal plants and healing], Zaria: Gaskiya.
Kiptinness, Evonne Mwangale & John-Bell Okoye. 2021. “Media coverage of the novel Coronavirus (Covid-19) in Kenya and Tanzania: Content analysis of newspaper articles in East Africa”, Cogent Medicine 8:1.
Lawal, Rabiatu. 2021. Tashen Corona: A recasting of Hausa traditional pantomime by the COVID-19 pandemic, Hemispheres 36: 57-68.
Mustafa, Linda Jummai 2021. The use of comic musical skits to overcome fear and anxiety during the outbreak of Covid-19 in Nigeria, Hemispheres 36: 85-98.
O’Hair, D. H., & O’Hair, M. J. (eds.). 2021. Communicating science in times of crisis: COVID-19 pandemic. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.
Oluwateniola Kupolati, Adebola Adebileje & Akinniyi Adeleke | Samuel Adu-Gyamfi (Reviewing editor). 2021 “Someone has been coronated” Nigerian English lexical innovations in the COVID-19 Pandemic, Cogent Arts & Humanities, 8:1, DOI: 10.1080/23311983.2021.1947559
Tsao, Shu-Feng, Helen Chen, Therese Tisseverasinghe, Yang Yang, Lianghua Li, Zahid A. But. 2020. “What social media told us in the time of COVID-19: a scoping review”, Lancet Digit Health 3: e175–94, https://doi.org/10.1016/ S2589-7500(20)30315-0.
Wall, L. Lewis. 1988. Hausa Medicine: illness and well-being in a West African culture, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.