african-american

CALL FOR PAPERS

Bearing Witness: Reading James Baldwin in the 21st Century

(A Critical Anthology)

“Perhaps I did not succumb to ideology . . . because I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness. In the church in which I was raised you were supposed to bear witness to the truth. Now, later on, you wonder what in the world the truth is, but you do know what a lie is.”—James Baldwin, Interview by Julius Lester

Hair as a source of a serious study and research is often trivialized and overlooked. The Foreword to the volume entitled Hair: Styling, Culture and Fashion (2008) expresses the idea that “hair [has] exciting and diverse potential as an academic topic […], so critical analysis of its practice and experience provides a fascinating and engaging entry point to contemporary debates around the body and its fashioning” (ix).  It calls for “a serious approach” to hair, as “a subject area richly deserving of new research” (ix).  Indeed, hair is an exciting field of research that recently, mostly due to the rise of fashion and hairstyles of African diaspora, has started to get more recognition.

Plenary Speakers include: Prof. Kim F Hall (Barnard College), Prof. Nandini Das (University of Liverpool) Dr. Preti Taneja (University of Warwick)

Swansea University is proud to host the 2019 British Shakespeare Association conference on the theme of “Shakespeare, Race, and Nation”.

18th Annual E3W Sequels Symposium

Keynote: Saidiya Hartman 

Fugitive Futures: Graduate Students of Color Un-Settling the University 

28 February - 2 March 2019, The University of Texas at Austin 

“...the subversive intellectual came under false pretenses….Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings”

—  Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study

Since 2005, when Sianne Ngai first developed the concept of “animatedness” to describe the ways that racialized bodies are made machine-like through external manipulation, Ngai’s work has continued to provide a useful foundation for investigating representations of black voices and black bodies in African American literature and culture. This session seeks papers that will contribute to this broader scholarly conversation by considering the ways in which black bodies have continued to be voiced, mediated, automatized, and silenced by external forces.