African Ephemera and the Archives
Symposium
Date: Friday March 28, 2025
Time: 9am–2:30pm
Venue: Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall / Memorabilia Room
This symposium will ask about the status of ephemera in African literary and cultural studies. How useful is “ephemera” as a category for thinking about African art forms? How do definitions of ephemera change when materials are collected and preserved in institutional archives?
Short talks by two major donors to the Beinecke’s collection of Onitsha market literature will be followed by presentations from scholars working on different types of African ephemera, ranging from newspaper archives to pamphlet literature, popular performances, street art, zines, and social media texts.
