History
Founded in 2016, the Arts Managers and Literary Activists (AMLA) network brings together founders and members of Africa-centered literary and cultural initiatives to create space for intra-continental collaboration, support new platforms and ideas for the promotion of African literature, and find ways to make academic research useful for literary and cultural production and vice versa. We aim at building a self-reliant and sustainable literary and cultural sphere focussing on the African continent.
We started with an annual workshop for aspiring literary curators held in Kampala in 2016, and 2017 and an online mentoring program that in 2018 became a four months’ fellowship. In 2018, we held a sister workshop for early career academics working in the fields of African literary and cultural studies that fed into a double issue of the academic journal, Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies, Volume 7, Issue 1-2 (2021).
Hosting and Coordinating Organization
The Center for African Cultural Excellence through the current director, Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire coordinate the activities of the network. The network’s inaugural activities (2016-2017) were part of the Writivism Literary Initiative, an older program of the Center for African Cultural Excellence.
Although the network gained some level of independence in 2018, her activities were still held at the same time as Writivism’s then annual literary festival. The network’s activities fettered out gradually after 2018, outside the publication of the double issue of the Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies journal in 2021.
In 2022, the network convened a double – panel seminar as part of the African Literature Association (ALA) conference, held online. An edited volume featuring early career African scholars on diaspora, the digital and embodied dimensions of literary activism, is expected between 2024 and 2025.
In April 2023, the network will launch a series of online (Zoom) webinars titled “Bridging the Diaspora Gap”, supported by the Institute of African Studies at Emory University.
Previous & Current Partners
AMLA Network 