2014 ESA Conference: Currents of the Black Atlantic

By
Paul L. Hebert
 – September 24, 2013

CURRENTS OF THE BLACK ATLANTIC

 

Black-Atlantic

2014 ESA Conference, The Graduate Center, CUNY

For more information, visit http://blackatlanticcurrents.wordpress.com/

CALL FOR PAPERS

Two decades since its publication, Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) united conversations about race, diaspora, modernity, and slavery within the Atlantic world. As its point of departure, the conference theme takes after Gilroy’s ethos of looking outside of established racial and nationalist categories. Conference participants will look within and beyond disciplinary boundaries. By revisiting the roots and routes—the philosophical genealogies and the future directions—of The Black Atlantic, we aim to bring together the ongoing conversations among students and faculty who have engaged with Gilroy’s heuristic paradigm. More specifically, we invite papers that, in light of The Black Atlantic, reexamine and theorize diaspora, transatlantic cultures, race, historiographies, and notions of “modernity.” In the spirit of thinking both with and beyond the Black Atlantic critical framework, conference panelists will negotiate its theoretical limits while gesturing towards alternative frames and futures for The Black Atlantic. Potential topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • Memory, Subjectivity, and the Black Diaspora

  • Ethics, Archives, and Historiographies of the Black Atlantic

  • Early Modern Atlantic Crossings and Early Transatlantic Exchanges

  • Engenderings and Queerings of the Black Atlantic

  • Sounds and Music of the Middle Passage

  • Black Atlantic Matters: Things and Objects of the Middle Passage

  • The Black Pacific; Intersections of Race and Labor

  • Latin American and/or Caribbean Studies and the Black Atlantic

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words, along with a 3-5 line bio, contact information, and a/v requests to BlackAtlanticCurrents@gmail.com. The deadline for abstracts is December 31st, 2013. Participants will be notified in early January. The conference will be held on March 14, 2014.