The Africana Studies Group Presents

"Any enemy of the Black man is the enemy of me": Departures and
Definitions of Afro-Latino Identity in the New Millennium

All Day Conference

Friday, 17 March 2006

The Graduate Center of the City University of New York

365 Fifth Avenue

New York, New York

In the wake of the 2000 U.S. Census, the media was filled with headlines
declaring that Latinos "outnumbered" African Americans, 35.3 and 34.7
million respectively, replacing them as the largest "minority" in the
United States. According to these same census figures, "17.6 million
Hispanics described themselves as white, 939,471 Hispanics described
themselves as black, and 16.7 million checked off neither white nor
black but "other." These census figures represent the manner in which
some Latinos, when asked to specify their racial identity, privilege
their European and indigenous ancestry over their African heritage. As
historian George Reid Andrews notes in Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000,
"during the period of slavery, ten times as many Africans came to
Spanish and Portuguese America (5.7 million) as to the United States
(560,000). By the end of the 1900s, Afro-Latin Americans outnumbered
Afro-North Americans by three to one (110 million and 35 million,
respectively) and formed, on average, almost twice as large a proportion
of their respective populations" (22 percent in Latin America, 12
percent in the United States) (1). It is understood here that Spanish
and Portuguese America also includes the Hispanophone Caribbean, as
Andrews' maps of Afro-Latin America indicate. Implicit in our use of the
2000 census statistics is the awareness that a significant percentage of
those 35.3 million Latina/o(s) are the descendants and immigrants of the
Afro-Latin American diaspora.

The 19th century Cuban poet, critic, and revolutionary Jos=E9 Mart=ED
declared that "any enemy of the Black man is the enemy of me" in
recognition of the centrality of Africa

to TransAmerican culture and identity; following Mart=ED, our conference
seeks to identify, interrogate, and ignite discourse and dialogue on
African, Afro-Latino, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latin American, and
Afro-American cultural and political histories that may, in turn,
acknowledge the formidable potential of such linkages in the face of our
shared histories of oppression and resistance.

Continuing our work from the 2004 Black Feminisms and 2005 Black
Masculinities Conference, the African Studeis Group (ASG) and the
Institute for Research in the African Diaspora and the Caribbean
(IRADAC), both of the City University of New York's Graduate School and
University Center, seek papers that will contribute to the
identification and articulation of the socio-cultural and geo-political
correlations inherent to these multifarious diasporas. Activists,
artists, and undergraduates are encouraged to submit papers. We also
invite papers in Spanish, French, and Portuguese.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

The Ancient African presence in the Americas

Borderlands and Border Studies

Cosmologies, Magical Realism, Origin Narratives

Caribbean Epic Poetry

Dub Poetry

Nation Language

Nuyorican Aesthetics

Afro-Latin Music

Afro-Latino Film

Afro-Latin American Film

Afro-Latin American Resistance

The West Indian presence in Central and South America

Afro-Latino and Afro-Latin American Genders

Afro-Latino and Afro-Latin American Sexualities

Afro-Latino/a and Afro-Latin American Drama

Race and Class in Brazil

Haiti and the Dominican Republic

Afro-Latino/a and Afro-Latin American Fiction

Puerto Rican Liberation Movement

Afro-Puerto Rican Identity

Latino and African American Collaborations

Religions

Cultural Translation

Politics of Language

Dominicans in the United States

Health

Family

Queer Afro-Latino and Afro-Latin American identities

Migration

Immigration

Intersections of Race and Class

The Triple Struggle and/or the Quadruple Struggle

Santeria

Vodun

Candomble

Submit abstracts (300-500 words, please) by September 23, 2005 to:
AfricanaStudiesGroup_at_gmail.com<mailto:AfricanStudiesgroupmail_at_gmail.com>

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Received on Mon Aug 22 2005 - 10:51:21 EDT