CFP: Critical Responses to Brent Hayes Edwards, _The Practice of
Diaspora_ (abstracts by March 15, 2004)

We are writing to solicit several 5000-word responses to Brent Hayes
Edwards's _The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the
Rise of Black Internationalism_, to be published bilingually in the
United States and France in 2005.

In _The Practice of Diaspora_, Edwards has proposed that interwar black
literary and cultural studies should be reconfigured towards an
international perspective, one in which diaspora is figured in an
"anti-abstractionist" manner. Edwards organizes an expansive archive
of materials, one that notably privileges periodicals as salient
international texts, as a means of configuring black internationalism
as a series of practices. Intellectual labor is thus often located
within the "necessary misrecognitions," productive and otherwise, among
different black people's crossings in metropolitan spaces, preeminently
Paris.

We seek responses that reflect and expand upon the critical themes of
the book, responses that engage both with Edwards's specific studies
(of Ren=E9 Maran, of Paulette Nardal, of George Padmore), but also speak
to and debate more generally the book's implications for future
studies. What are the possibilities and limitations of
interdisciplinary work? What role do literature and literary studies
play in adjacent fields such as anthropology or history? Should the
archive be privileged as a source for work in twentieth-century
studies? What does it mean for diaspora to be configured as a set of
singular (if interrelated) practices? Does the future of postcolonial
studies lie in an internationalization of subaltern studies? What are
possible responses to the book's periodization?

Please send 200-word abstracts by March 15, 2004 to Abdul-Karim
Mustapha (mustaphak_2000_at_yahoo.com) or Jeremy Braddock
(jb358_at_cornell.edu).

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Received on Wed Dec 24 2003 - 15:31:51 EST