MSA 2024: Modernism and Migration across the Atlantic Ocean
The word "opportunity" in today's European languages is rooted in "port" as a coastal city, and "opportune" was first used to describe a wind that would be favorable to the European ships and explorers. As we know, for centuries, ports, seas, and oceans that surrounded Europe were considered as "opportunities" to discover new lands, dominate new populations, and to accumulate wealth.
In his poem "Man and the Sea," Charles Baudelaire, often known as the first modernist poet, addresses "the free man" who embraces the sea, regardless of how wild and indomitable it is, as they both "delight in death and carnage."
For "free" European men, wrestling with the waves did not necessarily carry them to their doom. On the other hand, for the Igbo people of Savannah, walking en masse towards the sea was nothing but death. For those who saw little hope for owning land in Europe, the sea was a promising prospect, a "port" to a better future. For those women and men on the other coasts of the Atlantic, who were coerced into boarding ships in order to till the appropriated lands across the ocean, waves were neither an opportunity nor a source of delight. In Derek Walcott's words, the sea has "locked up their monuments, battles, and martyrs.” For them, "the sea is history." Europeans who engaged in seafaring, despite having fought sanguine battles, could establish unity and solidarity through the opportunities they were seeking. For those in the Caribbean Islands though, in Kamau Brathwaite's words, "unity is submarine."
This panel invites paper presentations and scholarly research that scrutinize questions similar - but not limited to:
-How is the ocean represented in African and Caribbean writings?
-How do those who migrated from the Caribbeans or Africa to Europe in the 20th century, in the wake of decolonization, regard maritime voyages?
-How do Afro-Caribbeans and African-Americans whose ancestors were forced away from their native lands view the Atlantic Ocean as a resource of their past?
-How does the transformation of African epistemology - as a result of crossing the Atlantic Ocean - manifest in modernist literary traditions?
-How does living "overseas" affect the sense of identity of those who never crossed it in the first place, whether those with African ancestry or the creole descendants of Europeans?
-How do traditions and myths such as the Flying African inform modernist writers of color?
-How does the ocean contribute to mythopoesis in African, African-American, and Caribbean writings?
Please send your abstracts of no more than 250 words alongside a short bio to armin.niknam@ufl.edu not later than April 4th.