Comics, in their many forms, can be rich sites of multimodal meaning-making where image, text, visual style, color, and layout are but some of the key elements that work in concert to generate narratives and shape our understanding of them. Some short-form comics such as editorial cartoons, strips, and even instruction pamphlets mobilize a deft visual economy that often relies on abstraction and sometimes stereotypes, especially in the case of satire and caricature.

While Felwine Sarr’s propositions are future-oriented and seek to affect change worldwide through changes on the continent, this interdisciplinary conference asks what other kinds of Afrotopias have been imagined and created while also attending to who is responsible for the realization of such Afrotopias and who or what generates “insurmountable” obstacles to their actualization and maintenance.

The 4th Global Africas symposium, “Africa and China,” looks to the past and the present to enrich our understanding of the relationship between Africa and China beyond geopolitical and economic endeavors and does so through culture.

The 3rd annual Global Africas symposium — “Senegal Past and/as Present” — tackles the pressing and ever-urgent question of the past’s influence on the present, in particular colonialism’s many legacies, in light of recent developments in Senegal and around the world.

The second installment of the "Global Africas" series, “Gender, Representation, and the Maghreb,” explores the relationship between gender and representation in the Maghreb through the work of three women from different fields: Tunisian director Raja Amari, Moroccan rapper Khtek, and Moroccan artist Merieme Mesfioui.

The inaugural Global Africas event is a two-day set of workshops, lectures, round tables, and performances that focus on the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Congolese diaspora by featuring internationally renowned author Alain Mabanckou, the Paris-based artist and cartoonist Pat Masioni, and Belgium-based rapper Baloji.