CALL FOR PAPERS

A Commemoration of Britain's Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807

Academic papers and creative submissions are invited for this special issue to mark the two-hundredth anniversary in 2007 of London's abolition of the infamous Atlantic trade.

EnterText volume 7 number 1

Abolition's Bicentenary: The Black Atlantic Then and Now

Submissions are invited by 1 March 2007

The act passed by the British parliament in 1807 was, of course, only a beginning, a staging point in a long road. Slavery, near-slavery, and racial injustice remain widespread in today's world. The story of the early pioneers of reform is thus not only fascinating but relevant. This issue of EnterText is intended to reach forward as well as back: to consider the history and culture of an appalling institution which lasted hundreds of years and affected many millions of people, and of how its historic reform was achieved, but also to examine the legacies of transatlantic slavery in our time, in particular the hybrid societies and cultures of today's Black Atlantic. Paul Gilroy's phrase is a useful shorthand to address the communities of both New World and Old, their complex histories and diverse cultures, their achievements, their problems and their potentialities. From Bob Marley to Eddie Murphy, Condoleezza Rice to Kofi Annan, the Black Atlantic is now also a global phenom!
 enon: what are its meanings beyond the Western world?

Relevant questions include:

* The impact of the triangular trade on African, Caribbean, North and South American and European communities, their cultures and economies, then and now.

* The implications then and now for the Americas' first-nation peoples, and for the Asians whose indentured labour filled the Caribbean manpower gap after emancipation.

* European powers: their diverse relations to empire, and their legacies today.

* Neocolonial powers in the modern world: similarities and differences.

* The part played by the French Revolution and Haiti in the reforms of 1807.

* The roles of the Christian churches in complicity with and opposition to slavery.

* Campaigning for reform: strategies in ethics and politics then and now.

* Icons, cultures, and consciousness raising: "Am I not a man and a brother?"

* Negritude, the Harlem movement, Black films, art, literature and music.

* Theorising "race" - the history, the science, the fiction, and the psychology.

* Slavery's abjection: can guilt and suffering be redeemed in collective narratives?

* Where now? - truth, reconciliation, apology, pride?

Related creative submissions in any medium suitable for electronic publication are also invited.

EnterText is a free-access peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal published by Brunel University, London. It can be viewed via Google or at www.brunel.ac.uk/entertext <http://www.brunel.ac.uk/entertext> where advice on submissions is also available.

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Received on Mon Dec 11 2006 - 18:26:34 EST