african-american

The Emancipation of Bound Laborers in the Americas before the Abolition of Slavery

University of Montpellier, France
Friday, October 7, 2016

The broadcast of the miniseries adaptation of Alex Haley’s Roots, which aired in January of 1977, became a ratings bonanza, a cultural touchstone, and a defining moment in the representation of African Americans in popular media. 40 years later, the impact of Alex Haley’s novel and the ABC miniseries continues to be felt, most notably in the recent History Channel “reboot” of the miniseries, but also in less obvious but more profound ways.

November 2016 marks the 75th anniversary of Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (1941), a documentary text that juxtaposes Wright's historical analysis of slavery in America with Edwin Rosskam's photographs. This panel seeks to revisit the text from the perspective of recent trends in literary and cultural studies, as well as the conference theme of utopia/dystopia.

Though neither Mr. Thornton nor Mr. Bell evoke “Utopia” flatteringly in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North & South, each mention of the term situates the concept of utopianism at the center of the novel’s labour dispute and makes the reader wonder if Margaret Hale might not be a utopian heroine. Not considered a utopic text, North & South nevertheless engages itself in a conversation about utopianism (and dystopianism). This panel seeks papers re-reading non-utopic texts (or authors) from the nineteenth century as utopic. By June 9th, please submit a 200-word abstract, brief bio, and A/V requirements to Dan Abitz, Georgia State University, dabitz1@gsu.edu.

Co-editors Isiah Lavender III and Lisa Yaszek seek essays on black speculative art across centuries, continents, and cultures for a new collection called “Afrofuturism in Time and Space.”  When Mark Dery coined the term “Afrofuturism” in 1993 to describe art that explores issues of science, technology, and race from technocultural and science fictional perspectives, he did so primarily in reference to postwar African American art, music, and literature. Over the past decade, however, scholars and artists alike have begun to redefine Afrofuturism, pushing its temporal boundaries back to the 17th-century roots of modern science and industry while expanding its geographic boundaries to include diasporic black and pan-African speculative fictions.