“Lost & Found: Archives and Multilingualism in the (Post)Colony” is a one-day international symposium interrogating received definitions of the archive as well as ‘what counts’ as archive in postcolonial and colonial multilingual contexts.

The symposium is organized by CEREP in collaboration with the CLIC research unit and AFROPRESS at VUB; it includes presentations of current group projects (i.e. the ERC-funded projects AFROPRESS at VUB and ALMEDA at Uppsala University) and/or individual and group presentations of projects under construction that will be submitted to local and international funding bodies.

Although the symposium features two keynote talks by Ashleigh Harris, Uppsala University, who is the PI of the ALMEDA/ African Literary Metadata project and by Alison Donnell, who has recently published Lost and Found: An A–Z of Neglected Writers of the Anglophone Caribbean (2025), the spirit of this event is informal and exploratory; it is also geared towards presenting recent research, pitching new projects as well as brainstorming about grant applications.

We favour in-person presentations and interactions; however, it’s also possible to attend via Zoom. Also, participation (in person or via Zoom) is free, but registration is compulsory (please use the ‘registration’ link above)

Please click here to access the programme

Abstracts of the keynote talks

• “From the stacks to the savannahs: journeys to recovery and lost Caribbean writers of the mid twentieth century”
  Keynote speaker : Prof. Alison Donnell (University of Bristol)
  How do we find what is lost in the literary histories and traditions that we cherish? This lecture will explore what it means to wander across and beyond the established maps of the illustrious and strongly embedded history of Windrush writings. It will consider where the materials for such a recovery lie, which methods we need to be open to in order to find and work with these materials, and discuss the particular rewards and risks of this research journey
• “Monolingual archives and uncatalogued African literature: towards a method of mutlilingual archival practice”
  Keynote speaker : Prof. Ashleigh Harris (Uppsala University)
  This paper addresses the ways in which monolingual bias in major cataloguing standards like the Library of Congress Subject Headings and the Dewey Decimal Classification System have actively obscured and omitted literary expression in African languages. This has led to the hypervisibility of English-language African literature at the explicit cost of African-language materials, which is skewing the field of African literary studies. The paper will give examples of the ways monolingualism underscores an exclusionary practice and will then outline the method being developed by the African Literary Metadata (ALMEDA) project to address these biases and omissions. This method involves three related actions: the collection of African lexicons of literary form, the creation of a multilingual ontology, and the use of Linked Open Data to catalogue and connect materials across languages. The method is still in the early stages of development and I will therefore be very grateful for feedback and critical engagement.

Poster (PDF)