Laila Amine
Photo by Annette Hornischer

Associate Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities - Class of Fall 2020

Laila Amine is an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She completed her BA at the Université Victor Segalen (Brest, France) and MA in African American and African diaspora studies at Indiana University, where she also completed a double PhD in comparative literature and American studies. Amine previously worked at the University of North Texas and was a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In her first book, Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light (Wisconsin, 2018), Amine questions the dominant ways that Paris is imagined as a space of liberation for the African diaspora. Her writing has also appeared in American Literature, College Literature, and Culture, Theory, and Critique, as well as in the edited volume Paris and the Marginalized Author. Amine currently serves on the MLA Forum’s executive committee on race and ethnicity studies.

Project Description

Return Literature, Affect, and the Black Diaspora

In her Academy project, Amine combines archives and theories of travel, migration, and exile to rethink mobility in contemporary black English-language literatures. She uses the term “return literature” to bring together literary works and critical discourses that have hitherto been cordoned off: the African diaspora returning to an ancestral home; immigrants or their descendants returning to a familial home; and the return visit of exiles to their country of origin. Armine argues that contemporary black Anglophone authors write across these genres. Teju Cole, Marita Golden, and James Baldwin, for example, fuse spiritual, economic, and political quests for liberation across a variety of African diasporic contexts and reveal an array of ideologies associated with dislocation, relocation, and repatriation. Writers William G. Smith and Audre Lorde—the latter who helped shape the Afro-German movement in the 1980s—represented American subjectivity in relation to other racialized subjects they encountered in Paris and Berlin. Amine’s “return literature” asks: What remains meaningful about the return literature that lasted beyond the US Civil Rights movement and independence movements of African and Caribbean nations? How does return figure in conceptualizations of freedom, home, and diaspora? What is the relationship of return literature to the broader project of modernity? In Berlin, Amine will be attempting to answer these questions and will rely in part the Audre Lorde Archive’s recordings, photographs, and letters about Germans born to African American occupation soldiers.

Academy Activities

06 Oct 20
James Baldwin’s Ambivalent Encounters with Africa Humanities

ONLINE & IN-PERSON: Andrew W. Mellon Lecture in the Humanities

James Baldwin’s Ambivalent Encounters with Africa

In this talk, Laila Amine critically assesses American writer James Baldwin’s encounters with West Africans and North Africans to challenge longstanding presumptions.

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