Emplotting Black Vindication as Literary Activist-Self
This panel includes various African American writers who used literature, art, history, or social scientific writings to oppose faulty presentations of an inferior tertium quid, i.e., subhuman capability. This panel welcomes review of writers and artists alike who endeavored through artistic, literary, historical, musical, filmic, or other means to contend with pseudo social scientific Untermensch designation. Writings and other media at various times and through varying genres and artistic forms, fashioned to make a case for full cultural and intellect parity. The panel hopes to cover an evaluation of various writings and artistic cultural production that railed against pejorative notions of cultural, sexual, or human hierarchies and its Black maligning intent. The panel can include hermeneutic readings that serve to garner from Black letters cultural expressions and artistic practices as text that carry embedded varying ties or heritage or ancient identities as a Black past.
This call for papers seeks critiques and/or countering of slanted humanism and or social studies in multiple fields that reveal connections to a conceived contributory Black past as renarrative statements that invert notions of inferiority and erasure. Also, accepted will be reviews on works that reveal gems of positive Black episteme professed as a viable (en)revisioning and narratology and unpacking that attends to contradictory demonstration and that propose (r)evolutionary insight of plotting, i.e., Paul Ricoeur's mimesis and use to challenge disparaging narrative histories/events, as manifestation of the Black literary activist-self through connective routes of time, place, and experience.
Review of works sought include the socially literary, artistic production and positive (re)creation of Black anteriority and the diasporic. Again, various periods and genres are welcomed from eighteenth century writings, for example that may include Philis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison and others and including contemporary artists and their art work for example from artists like Aaron Douglas, Kara Walker, Fred Wilson, and others, or musical forms construed as antiquipop for example from such artists as Sun Ra, Chaka Khan, Michael Jackson, KRS One Nas, Rhiana and others who brought back the ancient with allusions to past motifs and use (or any Black past allusion) as received or imagined.