HispanÁfrica

On September 12-13, 2024, the international colloquium HispanÁfrica took place at the Université de Lausanne, in which we addressed the topic of cultural relations between Africa and the Spanish-speaking world from different perspectives and on the basis of different data. While most of the contributions were in the fields of literary and cultural studies, I was given the opportunity to speak in the only session dedicated to linguistics. In this session, Davide Aliberti (Università di Messina) first presented his very interesting discursive-linguistic analysis of statements by three Spanish influencers who openly (and sometimes in a clearly racist manner) position themselves against Afro-descendant activism in the digital space. I then had the opportunity to present the attitudes of Equatoguineans towards Spain and the Spanish language, based on my interview corpus from Madrid and Equatorial Guinea. Finally, Dora Mancheva (Université de Genève) spoke about selected linguistic elements of the creole language Papiamento on the ABC islands.

In addition to many interesting contributions, there were also four plenary sessions by international specialists, including Mohamed Abrighach (Université Ibn Zohr, Agadir) on Moroccan literature in Spanish; Christine Le Quellec Cottier (Université de Lausanne), one of the great specialists on French-language literature from Africa / about Africa in Switzerland; and Joanna Boampong (University of Ghana), who spoke about the contemporary narrative of the Hispanic diaspora. It was a special pleasure to finally meet Joanna in person after we had met several times at online events in recent years.

Many thanks to Sara Bernechea and Marco Kunz for organizing this great conference!