cfp.english.upenn.edu

We invite proposals for a book-length project related to issues in women’s performance art and texts in the African Diaspora, broadly conceived. We are primarily interested in works by female artists and writers that articulate “the Black Atlantic” as both a theoretical concept and a lived experience, particularly in relation to the interplay of race, class, and gender in fictional and/or (auto) biographical pieces.
Despite the profound impact that the publication of Paul Gilroy’s seminal work The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) has had in the study of the artistic productions of African diasporas, the contribution of female performers to the formation of black diasporic communities continues to be mostly overlooked in recent scholarship. Feminist scholars have rightly argued that, in Gilroy’s conceptualization, “the unacknowledged subject of black modernity is … Western, urban and male” (Sharpe
442), given his almost exclusive focus on male discourses produced in First World city centers.

In an attempt to overcome this lack of scholarly attention, this collection focuses on English-language literary, media, and performance texts produced by women writers and performers from the Black Atlantic, including the Caribbean, Canada, Africa, the U.S.A. and the U.K. In this way, we seek to explore the ways in which women of African descent have shaped the cultures and his/herstories in the modern/colonial/post-colonial Atlantic worlds.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to: diaspora spaces, domestic and (neo)colonial violence, colonialism/postcolonialism, neocolonizaion/decolonization, ethinicization, gender expectations, genre conventions, (g)localities, un/homing desires, melancholia, metropole and peripheries, memory, nostalgia, performance, power/resistance, re-writing national narratives, roots and routes, slavery and women trafficking, subjectivity/identity/citizenship, systematic rape and genocide, transnationalism, trauma and terror, women and war, women’s rights/human rights, writing the body.

Jenny Sharpe, ‘Cartographies of Globalisation, Technologies of Gendered Subjectivities: The Dub Poetry of Jean “Binta” Breeze’, Gender & History, Vol.15 No.3 November 2003: 442.

One page abstracts and one page CVs due: September 15, 2009

Completed papers due: January 30, 2010

Length of Papers: 6,000-8,000 words

Abstracts, CVs and completed papers can be sent electronically as a .doc or .pdf file to: black.atlantic.collection@gmail.com