TUESDAY, 13 JUNE

4 – 5.30 p.m. PARALLEL SESSIONS

PANELS 1,3,4,9

PANEL 1

Identity Formation and Trauma in the Works of Toni Morrison. Justine Tally (Universidad de la Laguna, Spain) Chair “Return of the Repressed: The Politics of Engraving and Erasure in God Help the Child.” Abstract While early critics of Toni Morrison’s latest novel, God Help the Child, were fairly quick to notice its intersexuality with her first novel, The Bluest Eye, with its emphasis on skin color, social acceptance, concerns with pedophilia, and stunted childhood, the title itself seems to echo another novel from 1964 which also examined the furious chase for material wealth and social acceptance … though less obviously concerned with skin color. Kirstin Hunter’s God Bless the Child also traces the pursuit of happiness by a young black girl who looks in the wrong places for fulfillment. Hunter’s novel picks up on the Billie Holiday song written in 1939 which she supposedly confectioned around something her mother had quoted during an argument: “Mama may have, Papa may have. But God bless the child that's got his own.” But own what? Hunter’s protagonist finally comes to the realization that what she’s so steadfastly sought is more illusion than reality; Morrison’s Bride discovers that her sense of “self” has also been seriously misplaced.

Bio Justine Tally is Professor of American Literature at the University of La Laguna (recently retired) where she has specialized in African American Literature and Culture. She is author of Paradise Reconsidered: Toni Morrison’s (Hi)stories and Truths (Lit Verlag, 1999), The Story of Jazz: Toni Morrison’s Dialogic Imagination (Lit Verlag, 2001), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Origins (Routledge, 2009). She has edited the Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison (CUP 2007), and co-edited with Walter Hölbling Theories and Texts (Lit Verlag, 2007, 2009), co-edited with Shirley A. Stave of Toni Morrison’s A Mercy: Critical Approaches (CSP 2011); and is co-editor of a volume of collected essays with Adrienne Seward entitled Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning (UP Mississippi, 2014). She is also co-editor with Carmen Birkle of the section of E-JAS special issue on Women in the USA, volume 10, nº 1 (2015), entitled "Waging Health: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Wars." She has also authored the chapter on "Feminist Studies" included in Approaches to American Cultural Studies, Edited by Antje Dallmann, Eva Boesenberg and Martin Klepper (Routledge 2016) and has compiled the entry for Toni Morrison for the Oxford Bibligraphies Online (2016)

Mar Gallego: (Universidad de Huelva, Spain) “Traumatized Children, Sorority and Healing in Toni Morrison’s Love and Home.” Abstract In Morrison’s works traumatized children abound due to the influence of damaging racist and sexist dominant ideology. In many cases these children evolve into conflictive adults, but other times some of them manage to survive their childhood traumas and thrive as somehow functioning adults. In the latter cases female bonding figures prominently as an instrument for redemption and a path to physical and psychological healing. My contention is that sorority is enacted in Morrison’s novels Love (2003) and Home (2012) precisely as a catalyst to help ensure the survival of vulnerable female children into their adulthood, as it is exemplified by Heed and Christine’s lasting friendship and Cee’s communal ritual of healing.

Bio Mar Gallego has taught American and African American Literatures at the University of Huelva (Spain) since 1996. She obtained her Ph. D. Degree in 1997, and was awarded fellowships at the Universities of Cornell (academic year 91-92), Northwestern (1995, 2003, 2007, 2011 and 2016) and Harvard (1999 and 2015). She is currently director of the Research Centre on Migrations at the University of Huelva. Her major research interests are African American Studies and the African diaspora, with a special focus on women writers and gender issues. She has published two monographs entitled Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance (LitVerlag, 2003) and A ambas orillas del Atlántico: Geografías de hogar y diáspora en autoras afrodescendientes (KRK, 2016) and has co- edited several essay collections, such as Myth and Ritual in African American and Native American Literatures (2001), Contemporary Views on American Culture and Literature in the Great 60’s (2002), Razón de mujer: ensayo y discurso femeninos (2003), El legado plural de las mujeres (2005), Espacios de género (2005), Relatos de viajes, miradas de mujeres (2007), Género, Ciudadanía y Globalización (2009 and 2011), and The Dialectics of Diasporic Identification (2009).

Shirley A. Stave (Louisiana Scholars’ College at Northwestern State University) “Skin Deep: Identity and Trauma in God Help the Child.”

Abstract

Shirley A. (Holly) Stave’s essay, “Skin Deep: Identity and Trauma in God Help the Child,” argues that Morrison’s novel interrogates the old debate over the social construction of identity vs. essential identity, focusing on idea of surface (or skin) vs depth. Although Booker rightly points out that at the genetic level, race does not exist, such a claim says nothing about the effects of a social system of racism that is predicated completely upon what is seen with the eye—the skin. While Bride’s wounding stems from her lack of nurturance, Booker’s suffering begins when his adored older brother is raped and murdered by a pedophile who has tattooed the names of his victims on his skin. Like Bride, Booker cannot get beyond the concept of skin, understanding that his brother’s beauty, his surface, was the impetus for his death. In the course of the lovers’ willingness to probe beneath the surface, the novel engages in the attempt to return to the site of the originary trauma, which is, of course, slavery. Whether the couple is able to overcome their fears to allow for the integration of surface with depth remains in question, although their willingness to bring a child into the world suggests an acceptance of adult responsibility.

Bio Shirley A. (Holly) Stave , a professor at the Louisiana Scholars’ College at Northwestern State University, is the author of The Decline of the Goddess: Women, Nature, and Culture in Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, the editor of Gloria Naylor: Strategy and Technique, Magic and Myth, and Contested Intertextualities: Toni Morrison and the Bible and the co-editor of a collection of essays on Toni Morrison’s A Mercy . She is a contributor to the Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison, to a collection of essays in honor of Toni Morrison’s 80th birthday celebration, and to various collections of critical work on Morrison.

PANEL 3

A Thirst for Freedom: Afro-American and Afro-Barbadian Emigrationism within the Nineteenth Century Atlantic World. Tiffany Ruby Patterson (Vanderbilt University, USA) Chair

Caree Banton (University of Arkansas, USA) “Barbadians Encounter the African Coast: Settlement, Identity, and Stratification in Liberia.” Abstract: This paper explores the outcomes of the settlement of 346 Barbadians in Liberia relative to the colonization of other groups of blacks. It shows how the story of Liberian colonization changed as Barbadians and other groups of blacks, whose identities converged and diverged from African Americans, joined the nation-building process. The paper intervenes in theoretical formations of race through an examination of the ways in which the social relationships between the different groups of blacks transformed the ethno-cultural identity of the Liberian nationality. In the tensions of settlement and encounter, new group identities, social ascriptions, and nomenclature became a way of establishing relationships with diaspora and the state. This suggest that migrants did not so much abandon the basic tenets of the life they had left behind; they merely subsumed them into behaviors no longer bounded by white racism. As a layered story of Caribbean emancipation, migration, and African liberation, Barbadian emigration revives some elements of the debates in African diaspora history and forges new connections and paths in its historiography to create a transatlantic history of black experiences of freedom, citizenship, and nationhood. Bio University Lecturer, Social and Economic History, University of Leiden, Netherlands

Ousmane Power-Greene (Clark University, USA) “King Cotton’s Exile in Trinidad: Examining the formation of an African Diaspora in the late 1830s.” Abstract This paper will examine African American emigrationism to Trinidad in the late 1830s by placing it within the context of the transnational network of abolitionists, philanthropists, and human rights advocates who challenged slavery in the United States and within the broader Atlantic world after British emancipation. Those who left for Trinidad joined other African Americans who, as this paper argues, formed an “African American diaspora” by settling in nations, such as Haiti, Trinidad, and Liberia, and Canada. This “African American diaspora” has yet to be fully conceptualized or researched, and it remains an important site for scholars to examine the benefits, challenges, and setbacks of those black Americans who emigrated from the United States to various points on the Atlantic rim, such Trinidad, during the early nineteenth century. Black American “emigrationism” was not merely a reflex, but a clear illustration of the way black Americans came to situate their sense of identity with other African descended people living in the Diaspora. Ultimately this paper examines the history of black emigrationists who unified with other people of African descent by using their own mobility as a way to oppose racial oppression in the North and slavery in the Cotton Kingdom.

Bio Dr. Power-Greene completed his B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in African American Studies. A specialist in African American social and political movements, Professor Power-Greene teaches courses for undergraduates and graduate students on American history with a focus on African American internationalism and comparative social and political movements. His book, Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle against the Colonization Movement (NYU Press 2014), examines black Americans efforts to agitate for equal rights in the North and Midwest in the face the American Colonization Society’s colonization movement, which hoped to compel free blacks to leave the United States for Liberia. His current research projects include a study of Hubert Harrison and the New Negro movement, an examination of white northern colonizationists, and an exploration of African American emigration movements during the nineteenth century.

PANEL 4 Biotechnographies: Crafting Humanities and Sciences to Reconstruct Black Atlantic Narratives. Elizabeth J.West (Georgia State University, USA) Chair

Patricia Coloma Peñate (Universidad Cátolica San Antonio de Murcia, Spain) “Let’s get information: Bioncé’s diaspora heritage and ancestry in Lemonade.” Abstract Beyoncé`s latest álbum Lemonade has received considerable attention in part because it explores the singer´s conflict with her husband Jay-Z, but also because in this visual album she provides a complex picture of her identity. Lemonade´s visual content centers not only around Bey but also makes New Orleans its protagonist. The specificity of this site connects Beyoncé´s identity to Louisiana and its creole culture as the singer reveals in Formation, Lemonade´s first released single, “My daddy Alabama, Momma Louisiana. You mix that negro with that Creole make a Texas bama.” Lemonade embarks us on a journey with different stages that provide a picture of Beyoncé´s ancestry and heritage. Analyzing the cultural elements incorporated within Beyoncé´s portrayal of her Louisiana heritage this paper will question the ways in which the singer integrates the present with the past, both personally and culturally. Important elements within this map of Beyoncé´s creoleness are the spoken word, encapsulated in poet Warsan Shire´s poetry that inaugurates the visual album, proclaiming: “The past and the future merge to meet us here. What luck. What a f*cking curse”. This meeting of past and future throughout Lemonade is according to Amy Yeboah “a visual journey through the African diaspora… But it spreads across the diaspora. So you see it in Cuba, you see it in Louisiana. It’s a cultural tradition that connects women of the diaspora together.” Such connection is also a spiritual one. The spiritual dimension of Lemonade surpasses its Southern gothic atmosphere providing concrete elements of African-based spirituality through Beyoncé attire, face painting and actions. Beyoncé´s album Lemonade illustrates key elements of diaspora identities and proves how the past and the future merge into a cultural continuum. This visual album provides a fitting tool to talk about African-based diaspora identities, the importance of ancestry, folklore and African-based spirituality that can be incorporated in the classroom. As a contemporary cultural work, it opens up the space to view the convergence of past and future in Beyoncé’s Louisiana- based identity, and Beyonce's narrative offers us a broader pathway to see and think about black diasporic identity.

Bio Dr. Patricia Coloma Peñate- is an Assistant Professor of English at Universidad Católica San Antonio de Murcia (Spain). She obtained her BA in American Literature from Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain) and her PhD in English (African American Literature) from Georgia State University. Dr. Coloma Peñate also has a certificate in Latin American Studies that complements her formation providing a broader understanding of the African diaspora in the American continent, the focus of her study. In her research Dr. Coloma Peñate analyzes the transcultural connections between the African descended population of the U.S and Cuba. In her work she gives special attention to folklore, spirituality and female identity. Kameelah Martin (Savannah State University, USA) “Rosewood, Rape & the Politics of Respectability: A Black Family’s Rememories of America.” Abstract With the explosion of interest in genealogical research as exemplified by the success of Henry Louis Gates’s PBS series (Finding Your Roots and African American Lives) and TLC’s Who Do You Think You Are? I argue that genealogical research offers new ways of thinking the Humanities in the 21st Century. African American genealogy, in particular, is an underexplored area of research and professionalization for interdisciplinary programs in the Humanities. For the 2017 Collegium of African American Research conference, I propose to present an historical ethnography that seeks to gain a cultural understanding of one family’s involvement in seminal moments in African American history, particularly considering the infamous Rosewood Massacre of 1923. My research demonstrates how African American genealogy can enhance our broader knowledge of and humanize key historical moments in America. An interdisciplinary exercise in archival and investigative research, oral history, ethnography, and creative non-fiction, mine is a focused study that offers a nuanced exploration of American history through the lived experiences of a multi-generational family of minority citizens. Combing through census records, oral histories, photographs, cemeteries, and family papers to reconstruct the meta-narrative that ignores the enduring cultural trauma at the intersection of racism and US citizenry, I move beyond the titillation of recovering ancestries of enslavement to discern the impact of American social climates on how African Americans remember and participate in historical narrative. For example, family history indicts the racial violence of the Rosewood Massacre as the source of a sexual assault that resulted in the birth of my paternal grandmother. How, then, did politics of respectability and silence around sexual violence and racial uplift narratives disrupt, revise, and erase my great-grandmother’s rape (and the alleged murder of the white perpetrator) from the history of the Rosewood incident in 1923? Conceptually, I tie the project to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who reminds us that storytelling is inextricable from power, and Toni Morrison’s term rememory which occurs when ancestral experiences are visited upon descendants psychosomatically. People descended from enslaved Africans ubiquitously have taken a second or subordinate position in the United States and so thus their stories. My work intervenes in American histories, popularly imagined, by reclaiming and honoring the experiences of those who’s witnessing and testimony is believed unworthy of record. I query and move to demonstrate how African American genealogy and DNA analyses, especially, are viable avenues into deeper humanistic inquiry in the field of African American Studies. I join Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (2008), Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns (2010), and Lawrence P. Jackson’s My Father’s Name: A Black Virginia Family after the Civil War (2012), for instance, in fashioning an innovative and intellectually rigorous branch of scholarship that is at once personal and professional. Bio

Honors Program at Savannah State University. She is the author of Conjuring Moments in African Kameelah L. Martin is Associate Professor of African American Literature and Director of the American Literature (2013) and Envisioning Black Feminist Voodoo Aesthetics (2016) and serves as the Book Review Editor for the College Language Association Journal. Her research is at the crossroads of Africana literatures, folklore studies, and film.

Elizabeth J. West (Georgia State University, USA) chair

“Science, Technology and the Senses: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Black Atlantic Life Writing” Abstract In the Introduction to their edited collection, Biography and the Black Atlantic, Lisa Lindsay and John Sweet write, "By attaching names and faces to broad processes such as slaving, enslavement, identity formation, empire-building, migration, and emancipation, biography can illuminate the meanings of these large, impersonal forces for individuals" (1). It is precisely this point, one that I have always thought an intuitive supposition that spawned my intrigue with both narratives of fiction and nonfiction. Narratives passed down by descendants of those enslaved in the US have for the most part gone untapped as a source for understanding black experience in the country or the country's history at large. In recent times, however, the escalating interest of blacks in their genealogical histories has opened up innovative and creative possibilities for scholars studying the people and the world of slavery and its aftermath in the US. As one of those descendants of enslaved ancestors who passed along narrative sketches of their lives, I have become excited about the possibility of building these brief life summaries into more extensive life narratives. My enthusiasm is born out of two major developments in recent decades: the technological advancements in digital data and document gathering and advancements in DNA science. In my own case, starting with simply a worn turn-of-the-century picture of an elderly formerly enslaved woman, Louise Dent, and the very sketchy stories passed down about her, and with a few brief accounts about a post emancipation patriarch, I have through the aid of digitized archives and DNA testing been able to confirm and to round out more fully the brief narratives that were my starting point. Starting with the visual narrative, that is, the photograph, I have embarked upon a research journey that will answer questions of personal interest, but more importantly, through this interdisciplinary approach to life writing, I anticipate gathering building blocks that together help to see and hear from the enslaved and their descendants. I want to hear from my forefathers entering the state as slaves in the mid nineteenth-century (likely part of the wave of settlers from Georgia that started earlier that century) what that experience entailed--not from the perspective of the masters, but from the larger, but silenced voices of those enslaved.. I hope to find ways to hear and see those enslaved and their descendants beyond the historical and sociological prism of the victimized and dominated. Through this life study project, I anticipate a narrative that will test the practice "that pervades the study of 'slavery' as if it were a structure controlling people's lives rather than an ideological construction of the masters" (Miller 44). Bio Professor of English at Georgia State University, Elizabeth J. West focuses on early African American and Women's Literature, African Diaspora Literatures of the Americas, and literary representations of spirituality, religion and gender. She is the author of African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction: (Lexington Books 2011), coeditor of Literary Expressions of African Spirituality (Lexington Books 2013). In addition to contributions in critical anthologies, she has published essays in journals such as MELUS, Amerikastudien, CLAJ, PALARA, JCCH, Womanist, Black Magnolias, and South Central Review. Her 2012 article, “From David Walker to President Obama: Tropes of the Founding Fathers in African American Discourses of Democracy, or the Legacy of Ishmael” was recognized among “Featured Articles” in American Studies Journals: A Directory of Worldwide Resources. She is a former AAUW Fellow, a scholar in residence at Dartmouth College in the Department of AAAS, and a DAAD Fellow (Johannes Gütenberg University Mainz, Germany). She serves as Treasurer of the College Language Association and Executive Director of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association.

PANEL 9 (Un) free Travels: Nineteenth- Century Black Mobility and Transatlantic Antislavery. Chairmaine Nelson (McGill University, Montreal, Canada) Chair “Unfree (Im) mobility: Reading Travel as Resistance in Late Eighteenth and Early Ninetennth-Century Fugitive Slave Advertisements of Nova Scotia and Quebec.” Abstract Found throughout the Transatlantic World, fugitive slave advertisements demonstrate the ubiquity of African resistance to slavery. Produced by white slave owners seeking to recapture their runaways, standardized images of male and female slaves became a staple of such print advertisements. However, the more complex, individualized descriptions are a product of the texts. While scholars have mined such notices for evidence of speech, language, labour, and dress, this paper seeks to explore the possibilities and limits of mobility for the enslaved Africans who resided in two of the northern colonies which became Canada, Nova Scotia and Quebec. Fugitive slave notices often detailed not only the date and even the time of the enslaved person’s escape, but where the owner presumed the fugitive to be headed, by what means, who assisted them, and for what ends. As such, the notices inadvertently disclose the sophisticated reasoning, intelligence, and forethought that went into planning such escapes. 2 As I will argue, the notices also allow us to conceptualize the limits of mobility for unfree people in Canada. Charmaine A. Nelson is a Professor of Art History at McGill University (Montreal). Her research and teaching interests include postcolonial and black feminist scholarship, Transatlantic Slavery Studies and Black Diaspora Studies. She has made ground-breaking contributions to the fields of the Visual Culture of Slavery, Race and Representation, and Black Canadian Studies. Nelson has authored six books including The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and Slavery, Geography, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (London: Routledge, 2016).

Bio Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson is a Professor of Art History at McGill University (Montreal). Her research and teaching interests include postcolonial and black feminist scholarship, Transatlantic Slavery Studies and Black Diaspora Studies. She has made ground-breaking contributions to the fields of the Visual Culture of Slavery, Race and Representation, and Black Canadian Studies. Nelson has authored six books including The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and Slavery, Geography, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (London: Routledge, 2016)

Nele Sawallisch (Johannes-Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany) “Transatlantic Antislavery Travels of Samuel Ringgold Ward.” Abstract In my paper, I intend to investigate the various travelings of Samuel Ringgold Ward, which he outlines in his Autoiography of a Fugitive Negro of 1855. A veritable globetrotter, Ward's journeys cover the North American continent as well as his tour through the different parts of the United Kingdom as an antislavery lecturer and agent. His autobiography, written before Ward settled in Jamaica in 1855, illustrates his involvements in transatlantic abolitionism as a black intellectual who, at the same time, establishes complex and ambiguous allegiances to the British Empire. Ward works with such notions as the "New Negro" and Black British subjecthood that oscillate between what scholars have described as Empire apologism and a radical call for Black rights and subjectivity. Nele Sawallisch studied English and French at universities in Germany, France, and Quebec, and is currently working on her doctoral dissertation at the Transnational American Studies Institute at Johannes Gutenberg- University, Mainz, Germany. The project is tentatively entitled “Fugitive Slaves in Nineteenth-Century Canada: Community and Life Writing” and looks at autobiographical life writing by former slaves from the 1850s who settled in today’s Ontario. Bio Nele Sawallisch, M.A. is currently a lecturer at the Transnational Institute for American Studies (Obama Institute) at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany. She has submitted her dissertation entitled "Fugitive Borders: Black Canadian Cross-Border Literature at Mid-Nineteenth Century" and looks at autobiographical life writing by former slaves from the 1850s who settled in today’s Ontario.

Ivy Wilson (Northwestern University, IL, USA) “Black Star Liner: James Theodore Holly, Emigration and ‘Negro Nationality.” Abstract This paper turns to the life and writings of James Theodore Holly as a way to rethink the terms of antebellum black movement beyond fugitivity. An Episcopalian rector at St. Luke’s Church in New Haven, Connecticut, Holly was a staunch proponent of “Negro Nationality,” a school of thought that advanced the necessity of blacks dispersed across the diaspora to form or join their own nations. Along with James Monroe Whitfield and Martin Delaney, among others, he was one of the most prominent advocates of the black emigration movement. By examining his exchange with Francis Blair, this talk takes the occasion of Holly’s vision of traffic within the hemisphere of the Americas as way to illuminate theories of antebellum black mobility. Ivy Wilson is associate professor at Northwestern University where he is affiliated with the Departments of English and African American Studies. He has edited several volumes and is the author of Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Politics (Oxford, 2011). Bio Dr. Ivy Wilson is associate professor at Northwestern University where he is affiliated with the Departments of English and African American Studies. He has edited several volumes and is the author of Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Politics (Oxford, 2011).

5:45 -7:15 pm PLENARY SESSION

Dr. Magdalena Zaborowska, (University of Michigan Ann Arbor) “James Baldwin’s Black Queer Dwellings.”

Bio Magdalena J. Zaborowska (B.A., M.A., Warsaw University, Poland [1987]; Ph.D., University of Oregon [1992], USA), Professor, Departments of American Culture and Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Research and teaching fields: literary and cultural studies approaches to intersections of social space and transatlantic discourses on race, nationality, (queer) sexuality, and gender; African American literature (esp., James Baldwin), immigrant ethnicities,feminist, and critical race theory; post-totalitarian East-Central Europe. She has taught and been a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Oregon, Furman University, Tulane University, Aarhus University in Denmark, University of Italy in Cagliari (Sardinia) and Université Paul-Valéry in Montpellier in France. Books: the MLA award-winning: James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Duke UP 2009) and How We Found America: Reading Gender through East European Immigrant Narratives (University of North Carolina Press, 1995); edited and co-edited collections: Other Americans, Other Americas: The Politics and Poetics of Multiculturalism (Aarhus University Press, 1998), The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature (Routledge, 2001), and Over the Wall/After the Fall: Post- Communist Cultures in the East-West Gaze (Indiana University Press, 2004)..

WEDNESDAY, 14 JUNE

9:00 -11:00 am

PANEL 6

Reckoning with Race and Rights: Historical Perspectives, Recent Issues.

Patrick Miller (Northeastern Illinois University, USA) Chair

Cheryl Greenberg (Trinity College, Hartford, CT, USA) “Race, Rights and Sexuality: African Americans and the Fight for Gay Marriage.” Abstract Despite a long struggle for civil (and civic) rights, the African American community was, as a whole, slower to embrace the cause of gay marriage than other rights- oriented groups. The challenge was both religious (the African American community, including its activists, are more often engaged with the church than most other groups) and political (gay is NOT the “new black,” many black activists insisted.) Yet, over time, African American attitudes have been moving toward support for gay marriage and LGBTQ rights in general, visible for example in different voting preferences in state referenda on gay marriage over time (before the Supreme Court resolved the question for the entire nation.) This proposed paper will explore several of the factors that, I argue, have helped move the community toward greater support of LGBTQ issues. Black LGBTQ activists worked hard within their communities, particularly after Act Up exploded gay men’s activism, and I will examine one such national, interracial organization. Some civil rights activists, like Julian Bond, insisted (after initially resisting the idea) that the traditional black civil rights organizations embrace LGBTQ issues, and fought alongside his younger colleagues on the NAACP board to get that organization to take a formal stand. The paper will briefly review Bond’s efforts, as an example of the broader pressure traditional civil rights groups have been bringing to bear in black communities. To a certain extent, the broader, generally white, LGBTQ groups have tried to make inroads into black communities as well, although with less commitment than many would like. And I will also examine recent intersectionality-oriented groups like M4BL and their arguments that LGBTQ rights are inextricably linked with African American rights. Most significant, and earliest, I would argue, were the efforts by black women, who recognized when the AIDS crisis first emerged that if they were to help black women with AIDS they had to address the homophobia in the black community that led too many black gay men to hide their sexuality and live a heterosexual life alongside occasional homosexual encounters “on the down low.” In other words, to help black women, these black female activists needed to address the black community’s homophobia. So this paper also looks at some of the efforts of SCLC Women, as an illustration of this particular strand of anti-homophobic programming operated in the black community. In short, then, this paper will suggest that the forces within the black community pressing for greater LGBTQ engagement are multifaceted and that their successes are evident in the changing views of African Americans toward gay marriage. Bio Cheryl Greenberg, Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of History, Trinity College, Hartford, CT.Cheryl teaches courses on African American History, the civil rights movement, and twentieth century social and political history. Her current research examines the factors at work shaping and reshaping African American attitudes toward homosexuality and gay marriage. Cheryl received her A.B. from Princeton University (1980), and an M.A., M.Phil and Ph.D from Columbia University in 1988. She has held two Fulbright fellowships, which brought her to teach in Finland and China, and a number of U.S. grants and fellowships. She is currently the Treasurer of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, and the American Historical Association’s representative on the ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) board.

Taoufik Djebali: (University of Caen, Normandie, France) “Africans in Calais: Refugees, Rights, and Politics.” Abstract Just last year, a record number of 3800 migrants died at sea while crossing the Mediterranean. The flow of these migrants has accelerated in the last few years, putting more pressure on European countries, mostly Italy and France. With the weakening of the state apparatuses in countries like Tunisia and Egypt and the collapse of the Libyan government, pictures of boats filled with Africans taking incalculable risks to reach the European shores have invaded the screens, impacted the political debate in European Parliaments, and triggered a severe backlash that is likely to change the political and demographic landscape in many European countries. France, more than any other country, has become a symbol of a major dilemma : how to manage the question of thousands of migrants and refugees who do not speak French, who have no desire to stay in France and whose concentration in the Calais migrant Camp is becoming a humanitarian, a social, and a major political problem. Contrary to migrants from North or Western Africa who can rely on a complex network of diasporic solidarity, those in Calais (coming mostly from Eastern Africa : Somalia, Eritrea, Soudan) have no cultural, historical or social connection with France. They cannot rely on the old established African diaspora in France. Their only goal is to cross the Channel and reach Britain where they think would have a rosy life. The objection of the United-Kingdom to their entry and the public pressure on French politicians to tear up the agreement between Britain and France that maintains border checks on the French side of the Channel, make a permanent solution to the problem practically impossible. Calais, a symbol of the inextricable refugee situation, is doomed to last. If not Calais, it will be another French coastal city. The African migrants and refugees in Calais cannot reach Britain, cannot be sent back to Africa, and have no intention of remaining in France, offer a living example of how difficult is managing humanism, humanitarianism, rights, and politics. Bio Taoufik Djebali.Associate Professor, American Civilization. (University of Caen) Visiting Professor, Tunisia, Morocco Master's degree in sociology and a PhD from the Sorbonne University on Race, Poverty and Public Policy. Books Minorités et Pouvoir dans les pays anglophones, Paris: L'Harmattan, 2014. Taoufik Djebali et Benoît Raoulx (dir.), Marginalité et politiques sociales: Réflexions autour de l’exemple américain, Paris: l’Harmattan, 2010.

Patrick Miller (Northeastern Illinois University, USA) “From Charleston to Founding of the ‘Blackstonian”

Abstract The eminent scholar Ira Berlin has recently offered a brief summary about the relationship of History and Popular Memory. In the introduction to his study of The Long Emancipation, he claimed that “History is not about the past; it is about arguments we have about the past.”1 Such assertions remain significant concerning current debates about the symbols that link the history of slavery in the United States to the violence and bigotry, the anger and the grieving that describe the racial landscape in the United States today. This paper speaks to issues concerning on identity and belonging within the vast American polity and it surveys several recent occurrences that have sharpened debates about popular memory and public history: how accounts from the past are rendered and remembered; how they sustain some peoples’ claims to a regional heritage--as the bumper stickers and license plates on some automobiles are said to attest--while they open out broadly, deeply, and often viciously to a longstanding history of white supremacy and racial hatred. And then, it speaks to how other images (sometimes counter-images) have been advanced amid swelling controversies over “presenting the past” and linking it to the present. If – in the aftermath of the Charleston massacre--the controversy over the Confederate battle flag offers chilling reminders that white supremacy and ‘massive resistance’ still includes rampant bloodshed and is clearly intended as terrorism, then the controversy over Yale University’s Calhoun College reveals some of the complexities involved in the naming (and renaming) of statues and monuments in the light of social change. And just now, the opening of a National Museum of African American History and Culture--the “Blackstonian” as some have called the edifice located on the Washington, D.C. mall— offers a vast set of representations proudly displaying centuries of resistance to racism. How are the relics of racism to be relegated, relocated, placed in context and explained? How can different icons make a clearer case for the linkages between past

1 Ira Berlin, The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), as quoted in Edward E. Baptist, “Black Abolitionists,” New York Times [book review], September 13, 2015, p. 15 and present and offer some lessons for the future? The paper is intended to advance a long-standing and wide-ranging discussion regarding the significance not only of popular memory but also of public history in the shaping of culture and consciousness in the 21st century United States. Bio Professor of American Studies (2016-2017) University of Helsinki. Publications: The Playing Fields of American Culture: Athletics and Higher Education, 1850-1945, Oxford University Press (forthcoming). Sport and the Color Line: Black Athletes and Race Relations in Twentieth-Century America (edited) Routledge, 2003 The Unlevel Playing Field: A Documentary History of the African American Experience in Sport, (with David K Wiggins), University of Illinois Press, 2003 The Sporting World of the Modern South (edited), University of Illinois Press, 2002 The Civil Rights Movement Revisited: Critical Perspectives on the Campaign for Racial Equality in the United States (Co-edited with Elisabeth Schäfer-Wünsche and Therese Frey Steffen), LIT Verlag (Hamburg and Münster, Germany; Transaction Press, USA), 2001.

Elliot Gorn (Loyola University, Chicago, USA) “Emmett Till in History and Memory.” Abstract Most Americans know the story, at least the brief version of it: Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago, visited his uncle Mose in the Mississippi Delta in late August, 1955. At a tiny crossroads grocery in the town of Money, Emmett whistled at a white woman (she later claimed he grabbed her and made obscene suggestions to her). Four days after the incident, the woman’s husband and brother- in-law kidnapped Emmett in the middle of the night, beat and killed him, weighted his body down and threw it in the Tallahatchie River. A month later, an all-white jury in town of Sumner Mississippi acquitted the brothers of murder. It was an enormous news story, not just in the U.S., but overseas. However, except among Civil Rights activists, and sometimes too in black family lore, the Till story more or less disappeared after about a year, and remained mostly forgotten for the next thirty-five years. The story began getting media coverage again in the late 1980s, and by early in this century countless newspaper articles, memorials, and especially documentary films brought Emmett back to center stage. The Till murder, many have said and written, was the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. Of course that is too simple. The Freedom Struggle began long before 1955, and it would have happened with or without Emmett Till. Still, the story had great motivational power in the months leading up to Montgomery; Rosa Parks was quoted as saying that she was thinking about Emmett Till as she refused to give up her seat on the bus. Today, as white America and the mainstream press once again admit racial issues to consciousness, references to Emmett Till appear over and over. With almost every police shooting, newspapers invoke his name. In October of 2016, a story went viral that the memorial sign in Mississippi, commemorating where Till’s body was found floating in the Tallahatchie River had been used repeatedly for target practice. My paper will explore some of the ways Emmett Till has been remembered, why he was mostly forgotten, and how and why the story has changed over time.

Bio Joseph A. Gagliano Chair in Urban History, Loyola University, July 2012 to date.

Books:

Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001; paperback edition, 2002; Korean edition, 2003). Constructing the American Past: A Sourcebook of a People’s History, co-edited with Randy Roberts and Terry Bilhartz

PANEL 7

Richard Wright and his Vision of the American-/African-American Diaspora Virginia Whatley Smith (University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA) chair Floyd W. Hayes, III (Johns Hopkins University, USA) “Richard Wright and the Dilemma of the Ethical Criminal: Can One Live beyond Good and Evil?” Abstract A neglected theme among Wright scholars is his concept of the ethical criminal, which Wright mentions only once in his novel of ideas, The Outsider. This paper attempts to fill this void by examining Wright’s construction of the figure of the ethical criminal. The novel centers on the lived experience of the existential-nihilist hero, Cross Damon, who is the embodiment of the ethical criminal. Conscious of the negative view of blacks in the white imagination, perhaps Wright sought to explore the meaning of this kind of existence but from a different perspective—that of philosophical criminals whose crimes have their bases in ideas. These are individuals who break the laws of American civil society, but consider themselves innocent because of the decadent character of that society. These outsiders are dangerous to the social order, in Wright’s view because they had become cynically disillusioned about their society’s values.

Bio Dr. Floyd W. Hayes III is a senior lecturer and coordinator of programs and undergraduate studies in the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University Dr. Hayes’s teaching and research interests include Africana politics and political philosophy, urban politics and public policy, educational policymaking and politics, jazz and politics, and politics and black popular culture.

John Lowe (University of Georgia, USA) “Richard Wright’s Projected Black Atlantic Trilogy: Migration, Diaspora, and Return.” Abstract In the 1930s, Richard Wright fled his native Mississippi and sought a new life in Chicago, becoming part of the “Great Migration” of African Americans. Here he wrote some of his greatest works, while simultaneously embracing the cause of the U.S. Communist Party. Eventually, however, after a move to New York and his rejection by his “comrades,” who found his fiction insufficiently revolutionary, Wright concentrated more and more on his racial aesthetics, while striving to provide for his white wife and their children. Refusing to let his daughters submit to Northern racism, he relocated his family to Paris, where he became the central figure in an ex-patinate literary coterie. This immigration, however, ultimately led to disappointment as well, as France exhibited a different kind of racial bias, including a fiery resistance to their colonial subjects in Algeria. Attempting to find a way out of the impasses of exile, Wright returned to his native state in his last published novel, The Long Dream, an underrated work that paints an indelible portrait of racial masking, economic corruption, and the strains on a moving relationship between the central character Fishbelly and his wealthy but corrupt undertaker father. That novel ends with Fishbelly’s incarceration, release, and immigration to France. Wright then composed a lengthy and powerful sequel, “Island of Hallucinations,” which has never been published. Some years ago, the great Wright scholar Michel Fabre, who had a copy of the manuscript, allowed me to reproduce it. The novel depicts a troubled and troubling cast of African American and African ex-patriates in France, and largely concentrates, as The Long Dream does, on the complicated and intersecting issues of sexuality and race. Fish’s corruption and the women he oppresses comprise the main story, but there are subsidiary narratives that involve politic issues and betrayals, the oppression of homosexuals, government surveillance, and the West’s relationship with Africa. Since my absorbed reading of this manuscript, I have discovered documents in the Beineke Library at Yale that sketch out Wright’s plan for the third volume in this trilogy, a novel that would depict Fish’s departure for Africa with the woman he has chosen. Wright planned to conclude this installment with the family’s reverse immigration back to the United States. My paper will mainly address the power and significance of “Island of Hallucinations,” which I see as an essential component of Wright’s legacy, particularly as it concerns the issues of immigration, exile, gender relations, politics, diaspora, and cultural overlays and conflicts. But I will also attempt to show that Wright’s premature death in 1960 forestalled what might have been a compelling trilogy of what Paul Gilroy subsequently dubbed “The Black Atlantic.”

Bio Bachelor's Degree(s): B.A., Vanderbilt University Master's Degree: M.Phil., Columbia University; M.A., Georgia State University PhD: Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Sachi Nakachi (Tsuru University, Japan) “Richard Wright and the American South” Abstract Haiku, a traditional Japanese poetry with seventeen syllables, captured an interest of European and American poets at the beginning of the twentieth century. Imagist poets such as Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, H.D., John Gould Fletcher, T.E. Hume and F.S. Flint were influenced by the form of haiku. Their understanding of haiku, however, is criticized by Con Van den Heuvel, for they did not pay attention to a philosophical aspect of haiku. According to him, Haiku in English had its real start in the 1950s. The Beat poets such as Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were often regarded as representative writers who adopted Zen Buddhism and haiku in their writing. Richard Wright is also labeled as a pioneer of modern American haiku movement. Wright came to be familiar with Japanese haiku poetry by reading R. H. Blyth’s four volumes on haiku and its relation to Zen. By March 1960, he wrote more than 4000 haiku poems. The extraordinary number of his works shows his obsession with haiku, but why haiku, a Japanese literary form, appealed to him so much remains unclear. Some critics consider that his interest in haiku is a reflection of Wright’s love of nature. It is true that Wright’s sense of nature grew out of his childhood relation with nature in Mississippi, but it is also true that Wright had a complicated relation to nature as an African American as he wrote it in Uncle Tom’s Children. Wright’s haiku should not be considered just as an imitation of Japanese poetry that disallows any grotesque imagery in the national world. His haiku should be regarded as a new hybrid form of art reflecting his painful experience in the South. Most importantly, Wright’s haiku has some characteristics of blues. Wright was interested in composing blues poetry in the 1930s. In his late years, Wright came to be interested in blues again because he found that blues was not only African American artistic heritage born out of the history of colonialism and black Diaspora but also a universal art which has an appeal beyond nations. By composing blues in the style of haiku, Wright tried to create a new transnational African American literary expression, which allows him to face the reality of the American South.

Bio Sachi Nakachi, a professor of English at Tsuru University in Japan. Nakachi earned her Ph.D and M.A. in English from Ohio University and a B.A. in English from Japan Women’s University. She was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of California-Berkeley and New York University in 2009 and 2010, respectively, and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge.Nakachi is now the chair of the Graduate School Committee and the chair of English Graduate Program at Tsuru University. Her areas of special interest include African American literature, Asian-American literature, Japonisme and Orientalism Studies, and English haiku. She has published 11 book chapters and dozens of scholarly articles. She also has given numerous invited lectures in Korea, Nepal, China and the USA.

Ginevra Geraci (Independent Scholar, Italy) “Life and Death of a Black Man(n) in Richard Wright’s ‘Down by the Riverside”

Abstract Two basic forces shape language and imagery in “Down By the Riverside”: the naturalistic representation of the inescapable circumstances of Mann’s life and death, on the one hand, and the modernist presence of his voice and thoughts--the focus on the self--on the other. Wright’s effort to put Mann’s subjectivity on the page through the use of free indirect discourse and vernacular interior monologue goes along with a further modernist element, namely the use of a symbolic mythic framework such as the biblical Deluge. Nevertheless, naturalism as an expression of social commitment, and modernism as a concern with form and craft, are not contrasting principles. In The Cultural Turn, Fredric Jameson proposes a dialectical theory of “realism as modernism, or a realism which is so fundamentally a part of modernity that it demands description in some of the ways we have traditionally reserved for modernism itself – the break, the Novum, the emergence of new perceptions” (London, Verso, 148). On the other hand, in reviewing Marxist theories of literature, Terry Eagleton defines naturalism as a distortion of realism: “For the successors of the realists…history is already an inert object, an externally given fact no longer imaginable as men’s dynamic product” (Marxism and Literary Imagination. London: Routledge, 1989, 28). By combining these two notions, naturalism and modernism can be considered as deeply related perspectives on the world, and even as a means to gain a tentative renewed alliance between man and history in the writer’s conscience after the reification of historical perception mentioned by Eagleton. Thus, naturalism and modernism are not opposing forces: the former provides the theoretical background against which the social and economic analysis implied in Wright’s work can be assessed; the latter supplies a range of technical tools to make the character’s subjectivity come to life while stressing the artistry of the writer’s effort. Such interplay between naturalism and modernism is further processed through solid imagery, on the one hand, and fluid tropes, on the other. Wright places the hero’s predictable failure within a system of hard facts: race, milieu and epoch. Accordingly, the hero perceives the social structure as a solid, impenetrable wall and feels compelled to obey orders and give himself up to white authority. External reality is depicted as a solid, impenetrable wall erected by violent nature, hard unfriendly whites, and iron-like American racist authority. This solidity, metaphorically representing the deterministic nature of social and historical conditions, has a balancing principle in the liquidity of both sounds and images. The author uses obverse pairings throughout the text to balance the fluid transition between the external, third person narrator’s voice and Mann’s personal, desperate, and alienated voice. The modernist elements thus include water imagery, thematic representations of individual isolation, and stylistic techniques that capture the qualitative levels of the African American hero’s voice. When Wright’s modernism deals with beleaguered African Americans subaltern subjects lost in the Mississippian waste land, it does articulate a problematic aesthetic of liberation posited against a realistic appraisal of material condition. Therefore, proving to be compatible perspectives on the world, naturalism and modernism try to unravel its complexity while producing an open artistic form.

PANEL 8

Self-Examination of Blackness in WWII and Post War Europe: The Legacy of Racism and the Absurdity of Existence.

Ewa Barbara Luczak (University of Warsaw, Poland) chair Larry A. Green (Seton Hall University, NY, USA) “African American Journalists in WWII & Post War Europe: Reimagining Identity.” Abstract Many Americans conceived of WW II as a medieval morality tale between the nobility of the Allies and the absolute evil of the Axis powers. African Americans during WW II observed the contradictions in this mainstream narrative and inaugurated a "Double V" campaign in the black press calling for the defeat of fascism abroad and racism at home. As the war came to an end and journalists and writers Roi Ottley, Ollie Harrington, and William Gardner Smith travelled through a war recovering Europe and the latter two became life-long expatriates, America, African American identity, and Europe are reimagined through a global prism reshaping African American self- perceptions and perceptions of Europe and America. This newly triangulated identity and perceptions are not always uniform among the three black artists and journalists, but reveal a process of self-examination of blackness as it relates to their place and people of color in both America and Europe. WW II and its aftermath removed much of the veneer of European omnipotence. Their views of Europe are much more complicated than that of an earlier African American press which portrayed Europe in the 1920s as a racially liberal oasis. William Gardner Smith noted the relative absence of racism in post-war Germany compared to America in Last of the Conquerors (1948), but in The Stone Face (1963) the realization of French racism against Arabs and its comparability to racism in America is explored. Roi Ottley further problematizes the search for a European oasis in No Green Pastures: The Negro in Europe Today (1951). Ollie Harrington's search for utopia and fear of American reprisals against outspoken black expatriates leads him from France to East Germany in Why I Left American and Other Essays(1995). The quest for racial democracy abroad and ultimately at home continued into post-WW II era revealing both the similarities and differences with the post-WW I quest. Bio Dr. Larry Alfonso Greene is Professor of History in the History Department at Seton Hall University where he teaches courses and specializes on African American History, the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era, and World War II. He received his Ph.D. degree from Columbia University.. He has authored numerous articles on African Americans in New York and New Jersey including: “Harlem Riot of 1935”; “African Americans in New Jersey History”; “Harlem, The Depression Years”; “The Emancipation Proclamation in New Jersey and the Paranoid Style”; “Black Populism and the Quest for Racial Unity”; “A History of Afro-Americans in New Jersey History”; and with Diana Linden, “Charles Alston’s Harlem Hospitals Murals: Cultural Politics in Depression Era Harlem.”

Ewa Barbara Luczak (University of Warsaw, Poland) “John Williams’ Racial Skepticism and European Ideas of Universality.” Abstract My paper focuses on John A. Williams' response to the condition of black exile in Europe in the late 1950s and early 1960s as delineated in his masterpiece The Man who Cried I Am(1965). As a correspondent for Ebony, Jet and National Negro Press Association, Williams toured both Western and Eastern European countries and was well familiar with the European scene. His essay "Black Man in Europe" provides a good synopsis of his travels and depicts Williams' disappointment with the racial climate on both sides of the curtain of the cold war. However, it is The Man who Cried I Am that offers the bitterest picture of the position of African Americans among fashionable intellectual elites of Western Europe. The book traces the story of exile and death of a black writer who bears resemblance to Richard Wright. The initial climate of fascination with the newly arrived writer in Paris eventually gives way to distrust and boredom when his novelty and exotic appeal wear off. Following the footsteps of his diseased friend, the novel's protagonist discovers European double racial standards and muses on the European legacy of racism which took a terrible toll during the Holocaust the traces of which were still fresh in the early 60s. Williams' turn towards the memory of the Holocaust is neither purely his own, after all numerous black writers living in Europe after WWII mentioned it in their work, nor accidental. He believes that American racism has its roots reaching back to Europe and the Holocaust should make black intellectuals more cautious when exposed to the myth of American racism and European innocence and Enlightenment ideals of universality, equality and brotherhood. Bio Dr. Ewa Barbara Luczak is Associate Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland and Vice President of the Polish Association for American Studies. Luczak is the author of Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination: Heredity Rules in the Twentieth Century (Palgrave, 2015); How Their Living outside America Affected Five African American Authors: Toward a Theory of Expatriate Literature (Mellen Press, 2010

PANEL 10

Physical Mobilities; Diasporic Imaginings and Identity: African and African-American Experiences and Narratives Fumilayo Showers, (Central Connecticut State University, USA) chair

Fumilayo Showers: (Central Connecticut State University, USA) “Diasporic Encounters in the ‘New African Diaspora’: African Immigrants Caring for African Americans in the United States of America.” Abstract Drawing from qualitative interviews and migration narratives, this paper sheds light on contemporary race and gender relations and new Diasporic encounters in the United States context by exploring a group of West African immigrant health care workers who provide health care support for a predominantly African American clientele. Exploring the relationships between the ‘new African Diaspora’ as represented by recent immigrants from Africa and the historical African Diaspora, this paper finds points of solidarity, but also important points of divergence and discord among these groups of Blacks in the United States. Exploring Diasporic encounters between recent African immigrants and native-born African Americans opens up new room for theorizing Black racial identities. In particular, these encounters enable us to understand how ethnicity and immigration status combine with race in shaping identities in Diasporic space. The context of this discussion - health care, an occupational field that is highly gendered and racialized provides an important setting to also investigate how race, ethnicity and gender intersect in shaping the identities of recent transplants from Africa to the United States. The findings of this paper hold significance for our understanding of the changing contours of race and ethnicity in the United States context, as well as the racialized and gendered identities of African immigrant men and women. These findings can be useful to launch a discussion of the similarities/differences between the United States context and the Black Diaspora in Europe.

Bio Fumilayo Showers is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Central Connecticut State University, USA. Fumilayo’s research and teaching interests center on international migration, labor migration, globalization, the African Diaspora and the contemporary African and Caribbean immigrant experience in the United States.

Portia Owusu (University of Warwick, Coventry, England) “Greener Pastures? African and African-American travels to Europe.” Abstract In a letter to his son Lewis whilst in France, Frederick Douglass wrote: “I find the people here singularly conscious of their liberty, independence and their power. They show it in their whole carriage and the very lines on their faces, and no wonder, for they more than any other people in Europe, have asserted all three in the face of organised oppression and power”. He wrote this in the 1800s. In the mid-to late 1920s, during the Harlem Renaissance, African-Americans once again placed great hope in Europe as refuge from American racism and a place to achieve collective and individual freedom. The wide range of art, music and literature produced by those who travelled during this period point to physical movement as essential for examining and questioning ideas of citizenship, diaspora and ‘home’. However, to what extent are these ideas exclusive to African-Americans and has meanings and significance of travel to Europe by African-American changed, in the context of events and politics of the twenty-first century? What can we make of the movement of continental Africans to Europe and how does this differ from the hopes and aspirations of black Americans who travelled to Europe? This paper will examine selected travel narratives by Africans and African-Americans writers to offer readings that aim to answer these questions. I intend to provide a discussion of attractions to particular European countries and cities for example, Paris, France for black Americans and London, England for West Africans. The paper will also question whether the geographical shift from America to Europe or Africa to Europe in search of greener pastures is idealised, when we consider Europe’s racial and colonial histories and its legacies in contemporary life.

Bio Portia Owusu is a Teaching Fellow in American Literature at Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick. She completed in her PhD in West African and African American Literature at School Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), the University of London and was previously at the Universities of Kent and York. In 2015, she won the prestigious Fulbright Award to the University of Kansas, where she completed her dissertation under the supervision of the distinguished professor of African-American literature, Maryemma Graham.

Stacy Showers: (University of Hertfordshire, England) “A Journey of authenticity: Encountering Diaspora through second hand tales and traditions among the children of African Immigrants in England.” Abstract Family narratives and traditions play a fundamental part in the self-identity formation of the descendants of the African Diaspora; serving as a source for social empowerment and also to help understand and revel in traditions and folklore of the ancestral land, or “home.” Deriving from history and heritage, second hand tales and traditions have been deemed a torch which can illuminate the customs of the native land, as well as give insight to the historical context and teachings of ancestry cognitive values. Research findings have conveyed second hand-teachings to be significant in shaping ones imagination of life in Africa and identifying ‘self’ across transnational borders. In light of this, this paper will focus on story telling amongst Sierra Leonean families, through lived experiences and the ways in which storytelling, family anecdotes and historical recounts can be utilised as a cultural resource, to promote knowledge and dispersion among African and Caribbean immigrants living in England.

Bio Stacey Showers attended the University of Kent where she attained a BA (honours) in Social Sciences in 2012. Stacey attended The University of Hertfordshire attaining an MSc in Social Work in 2015. She is now a qualified Social Worker and works for Ealing Borough Council, working within the older person’s team.

PANEL 12 Ontology, Implications, and Complexities of the African Diaspora Experience Stephen Casmier: (Saint Louis University, USA) Chair Stephen Casmier (Saint Louis University, USA) “The Mask, Ritual, and an Ontology of Diaspora.” Abstract Black-faced minstrelsy was perhaps the first form of unique popular American entertainment. It captured and constituted the American imagination, dangerously conveying and exploring the dreadful and inherent anxiety over semblance engendered by the symbolic economy endemic to figurations of the body, sexuality, racial identity, the real and fiction, performance and representation, truth and simulation – the very grammar of Western epistemology and simulacra, which, says, Jean Baudrillard "is never that which conceals the truth -- it is the truth which conceals that there is none." According to Toni Morrison, donning the black mask of minstrelsy liberated white performers, enabling them to express with abandon the abject and forbidden while foregrounding the contingent nature of sexual, racial and class identities. This paper will explore the ritualized reaction in expressive culture of the African Diaspora to such performances as Africans and their descendants re- appropriate the mask, taking it on a detour as an ontology that undermines the ironic tensions of Western epistemology and foregrounds Black Atlantic cosmology and a consciousness that uniquely defies the grammar of semblance and performance. It will thus explore the texture of a consciousness, that could first transform the target and hidden pleasures of minstrelsy through figures who expose the contingent nature of epistemological blackness, responding with an ontology that presents masking as grounded in the cosmology and connection of the Black Atlantic experience: they become the mask embodying spirits while intimately layering burnt cork onto dark skins in the early 20th century. Meanwhile, theorists and writers attempted to elaborate this syncretic transformation with concepts such as "double consciousness" or poems that valued the discredited West African ritual. They explore the "articulation" and timeless, immemorial genealogical excavation of such consciousness in the interactional flow of intellectual currents between Africa, the Americas and Europe as it relates to redeploying within expressive culture what Toni Morrison has labeled the "discredited knowledge" of African cosmology. The paper will then take this discussion into the later 20th and early 21 centuries by exploring the conjuring of radical and inversive Diasporic conscious through the poetry and writing of figures such as Leopold Senghor, WEB DuBois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Chinua Achebe, and Toni Morrison, the music of George Clinton, Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong, Sun Ra and the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, the films of Souleymane Cissé and Wendell B. Harris and finally through recent television shows such as Marvel's Luke Cage, and Donald Glover's "Atlanta."

Bio Stephen Casmier is an associate professor in the Department of English at Saint Louis University. His research interests include African American literature and expressive culture and the literature of the African Diaspora. He received his doctorat from the Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis and has taught in France, Holland and on the Saint Louis University Campus in Madrid. He has published articles on African American literature and the literature of the African Diaspora. He has taught courses in "Literature of the African Diaspora," "From Harlem to Paris," "Reading Jazz," "Postcolonial Literature," and "African Americans in Europe."

Donald Culverson (Governors State University, USA) “Social and Political Implications for Third Wave African Diaspora Movement in the US.” Abstract One of the most interesting aspects of recent demographic change in the U. S. is increased diversification of the black population. Since 1980 the number of black immigrants has reached nearly 4 million, or about 9% of the African-American population. The Census Bureau expects this trends to continue well into the 21st century, especially in metropolitan regions of the northeast and the south, where immigrants make up close to a third of the black metro area population. While the majority of black immigrants come from the Caribbean and Africa, regions from around the world, including Central and South America, Europe, and South Asia add to it. Scholars of the African diaspora see these trends as representing a third historical wave of migration. The first occurred during the centuries prior to sustained European contact when Africans migrated to various regions of the continent, the trans-Atlantic slave trade that sent millions of captives to the Americas is the second stage, and the late-20th and early-21st century migrations to North American and Europe represent the latest stage.

Assumptions about the homogeneity of black immigrant populations persist, but closer examination of the above trends suggests otherwise. The broad range of attributes and liabilities of entering immigrants shapes their assimilation capabilities. Political conditions of country of exit, religion, social class, levels of educational attainment, as well as the resilience of the accepting community, defy easy categorization as variables that affect immigrant adjustment to the host society. This paper has two major objectives. The first is to examine the socio-demographics of the black immigration population since 1980 in four metropolitan areas, Miami, New York, Chicago, and Houston, each with different configurations of African diaspora immigrants. The second objective is to explore patterns of immigrant organizational development in each metro area focusing on business-professional, immigrant advocacy, self-help, and civic groups. Exploring the organizational basis of immigrants offers insights into how they, 1) define identity, 2) accumulate political capital, 3) navigate space, and, 4) define their relationship to other diaspora immigrant populations and to black American communities. Bio Donald Culverson Governors. State UniversityUniversity Park, Illinois, United States

Edelquine Shivachi (University of Notre Dame Du Lac- Indiana, USA) “The 21st Century Africans in diaspora and their Challenges: What way forward?” Abstract Diaspora is a Greek word meaning disperse. Robert Stuckert defines an African as a person having any known trace of black ancestry or “blood” regardless of how far back one must go to find it. A concomitant belief is that all whites are free of the presumed taint of Negro ancestry or “blood.” Therefore, an African diaspora is any person with a trace of black ancestry who is not in his/her biological home but in dispersion. Colin Palmer, in his article, “Defining and Studying the Modern African Diaspora,” states that, the first African diaspora was a consequence of the great movement within and outside of Africa that began about 100,000 years ago. This early movement, the contours of which are still quite controversial, constitutes a necessary starting point for any study of the dispersal and settlement of African peoples. Africans in diaspora throughout the centuries have faced many challenges in looking for their identity as persons. This paper presents the challenges faced by the 21st century Africans in diaspora and a proposal of the way forward. In the first part, the paper will examine the events that lead/led to the dispersion of the current Africans in diaspora and offer challenges that the present Africans in diaspora face in the second part. It will conclude with a proposal on the way forward in the last part. The scope of the paper will be the Africans who are currently living in Chicago, one of the states of the United States of America, who came from Kenya. The author will make field studies and interview the Africans who originated from Kenya and they are currently living in Chicago. The author will also have recourse to empirical studies that have already been done and she will make use of the library resources.

11:15-12:45 PLENARY SESSION:

Dr. Nemata Blyden: Associate Professor of History and International Affairs, The George Washington University, USA. “How Like a Barbarian Should I Look to the Natives: Reverse Migrations and Diasporic Encouters in Africa and America.”

Nemata Blyden specializes in African/African Diaspora history, and has researched women's issues in nineteenth century Liberia. She has also done work for Encyclopedia Britannica and for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York Public Library). Professor Blyden has lived in Africa, Europe and the Soviet Union, and remains engaged with issues pertaining to African development.

3:45-5:15 p.m.

PANEL 14 Black Activism: Self-determination and Black Power Patricia Williams Lessane (College of Charleston, SC, USA) Chair

Lydia Lindsey (North Carolina Central University) “Black Lives Matter: Grace P. Campbell and Claudia Jones-An Analysis of the Negro Question, Self-Determination, Black Belt Thesis.” Abstract Black women have always stood at the helm of every movement seeking justice for black people. Black women activists and theoreticians have carved out an intellectual space to uncover, (re)define, contextualize, and validate a leftist revolutionary theory. Black women’s perspective, theoretical articulations within the communist movement remains underdeveloped. Although many black women theoreticians’ analysis differs in their emphasis and conclusions regarding liberation, but there are several areas of convergence, namely, that black people are oppressed on multiple interlocking levels. Articulations of black women’s perceptive on the Negro Question, self-determination, and the Black Belt thesis has increasingly become visible in the literature and have provided a radical analysis in a black female voice on race, capitalism, and class. The primary purpose of this paper is to offer an analysis of Grace P. Campbell’s and Claudia Jones’s, writings and activisms who were two leading black women communists. In both women’s writings, there is an underlying assumption that the dominant societal structures and ideologies must be transformed to eradicate oppression. Their writings provide a unique insight into the ways in which women pieced together fragmented histories of black people and their struggle for full equality and human dignity. Both the lives of Campbell and Jones illustrate the primary strength of the black radical tradition in its ability to change and shift and merge, to disappear and then re-appear again in new places and in new forms as it reacts to the cycles of capitalism and nationalism, which can help explain the emergence of the #Black Lives Matter hashtag initiated by three black women: Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and Alice Garza. In a contemporary assessment, #Black Lives Matter movement is a shifting stance and a recommitment to the core tenets of black self-determination.

Bio Associate professor, History Department, North Carolina Central University

Brenda Gayle Plummer (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA) “Continental Black Power in the 1970s: Diaspora and the Map.” Abstract This paper takes note of the synchronous nature of black insurgency in the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean in the 1970s. It thus suggests the utility of looking at North American, rather than nationally specific, black freedom struggles. Examining black insurgency on the basis of a “moral geography” could lead to new insights about the diaspora. While African American discourses are widely adopted internationally, their hegemony is displaced when they are mapped onto a narrative of continuous commerce within the Americas, textured by the histories of slavery, migration, imperialism, and cultural exchange. The curious liminality of the Caribbean in U.S. perceptions (limited mostly to tourism) clashes with the profundity of its constitutive role in the history of the hemisphere. Just as it is not possible to write U.S. history without studied reference to the African American experience, it is not possible to write the history of African American activism without careful examination of its intersection with the goals and aspirations of Caribbean peoples in their homelands and overseas. Caribbean histories specific to particular nations, and trans-Caribbean histories have been written, all of which can be appreciated independently of U.S. and Canadian developments. But there is also a Caribbean history not easily disentangled from larger accounts of imperialism and migration. The Black Power revolt in the Caribbean, for example, coincided with the growing realization that the politics of independence had not extended to creating equal opportunity and economic improvement for the masses of Africa-descended people in the Americas. It also coincided with the Black Power movement in the United States. Disaffection encouraged concerted action among diaspora dissidents with common grievances against the great powers. There is yet another dimension. By the 1970s Canadian finance capital and extractive industries were a presence in the Caribbean republics. Caribbean dissidents had begun criticizing Canada's role in local affairs along with the more common censure of "Yankee imperialism" directed at the United States. Additionally, there had long been a diaspora of Caribbean immigrants in Canada as students and permanent residents. Many of these had become more vocal in their criticism of neocolonialism. Aside from the black inhabitants whose Canadian residence was in some part a function of Commonwealth ties, Canada had another black population, a community in Nova Scotia that dated from the period of the American Revolution when the British army in retreat evacuated black loyalists from the revolutionary areas. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) began scrutinizing the Black Power Movement, sharing information with the FBI. Ever since the era of the Underground Railroad and the Indian Wars, events in the United States had affected Canadian security. In 1967, the same year that residents of Windsor, Ontario watched the southern sky redden with flames from Detroit’s insurrection, the RCMP launched a program to improve its ability to investigate persons and groups deemed subversive. Those now included Caribbean and aboriginal radicals. The RCMP feared coordination between Canadian and American dissidents; its agents even crossed the border to monitor events at U.S. universities. Bio Professor, Departments of History, and Afro-American Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison, June 1994 to date. Associate professor, 1991-94 Associate professor, Department of History, and Department of Afro-American and African Studies University of Minnesota, 1987-1990, assistant professor, 1981-1987. Lecturer and research fellow, Black Studies Department, and Center for Black Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1979-81. Instructor, Department of History, Fisk University, 1973-75. Books: In Search of Power: African Americans in the Age of Decolonization, 1956-1974 (Cambridge University Press, November 2012) Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1988, ed. (University of North Carolina Press (2003) Concepción Parrondo Carretero: (University of Málaga, Spain) “Journeys in Time and Space in Octavia Butler’s Kindred, a Modern Notion of the ‘Middle Passage’” Abstract Octavia Butler has defined her most popular work of fiction as a “kind of grim fantasy,” partly because the novel represents a rude awakening for twentieth century African Americans to the legacy of a past yet to be understood and reconciled with; and partly because Kindred hints at the potential for an universal co-existence between two races: the black and the white. Dana Franklin, a young African American writer and her white husband Kevin are forced to live the terrible past that will challenge their life together. The couple faces the sad reality of the USA in the late 1970s: the distorted portrayal of slavery. This paper aims to point out Butler’s skillful writing style in working towards accepting and embracing the past. In so doing, themes such as slavery, unawareness of the past, gender/race relations and female resistance and growth will be analyzed. Butler’s time travel reminds us of Middle Passage, slavery and social oppression. Halfway between a neo-slave narrative and a science fiction novel, Kindred transpires a desire to find common ground between two races, two genders and two classes still at odds in the nineteen seventies. KEY WORDS: journey; displacement; slavery; middle passage; resistance; growth.

Bio

P.H. candidate at University of Malaga

PANEL 16

To Dream a Black World: The Convergence of Realism and Afrofuturism in Contemporary Art and Performance. James Smalls (University of Maryland, USA) chair Catalina Iannone (University of Texas at Austin, USA) “Spain, Blackness and the Visual Archive: a critical approach to Juan Valbuena’s Salitre.” Abstract In this project I analyze photographer Juan Valbuena’s Salitre collection, published in 2015, as a visual archive of blackness in contemporary Spain. Between 2009 and 2014 Valbuena collaborated with the residents of a piso-patera, a small apartment where many newly arrived immigrants cohabitate, in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighborhood. With the 12 Senegalese men who lived together on Calle Salitre, Valbuena created a box of thirteen books of photos, drawings, texts, and mementos documenting their lives. Twelve of the books in the collection were composed by the apartment’s inhabitants while the thirteenth, Valbuena’s, contextualizes the piece with narrative text and photos taken inside the house. In my analysis of Salitre I ask: How does this collection showcase a manner in which blackness is conceived and visually represented in contemporary Spain? As Ben Campkin, Mariana Mogilevich, and Rebecca Ross mention in “How Images Shape Our Cities,” photography offers a manner through which one can make sense of changes in the world around us. In the case of Salitre, the collection works as a visual archive to address questions regarding Spain’s changing demography, in particular the impact of diasporic movements on public and private spaces. In my analysis of the portrayal and self-representation of black bodies in these photos I take into account what theorist Nicole Fleetwood terms “non-iconicity,” that is, the inversion of normative forms of representation of black bodies in visual culture. With this in mind, I focus not only on the images themselves, but also their production and the implications of creating this sort of visual archive. I assert that the series provides us with an opportunity to critically assess the representation of blackness in Spain and its relation to questions of nationalism, social mobility, and integration.

Bio

Catalina Iannone is a PhD Candidate at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and a Fulbright Research Fellow in Spain for the 2016-2017 academic year. She received a Master's with distinction in Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Cultures from New York University in Madrid. In her dissertation project she analyzes various forms of cultural production including urban art, documentary film, and photography related to waves of development, their ideological implications, and their respective contestations in Lavapiés (Madrid) and Mouraria (Lisbon).

James Smalls (University of Maryland, USA) “The ‘Precarious Imaging’ of Black Queer Diasporas.” Abstract Although Black Studies, Queer Studies, and Diaspora Studies are typically classified as independent categories of inquiry, their boundaries tend to be rather fluid. The same can be said of the designations “visual” and “visuality,” which are complementary but not the same. The latter designation constitutes a complex discourse of difference (otherness/alterity) and refers to the ways in which discourse and codes such as race, queerness, and diaspora get produced, reproduced, caught up and circulated within the domain of the visual. So, what might a black queer diasporic visuality look like? That is, in what ways might black queer diaspora be brought into realms of the visual and what themes, issues, and conundrums would it engage? This paper seeks to grapple with these questions by highlighting and critiquing those visual and ideological issues resulting from the convergence of black, queer, and diasporic identities in visual culture of the twenty-first century. In addition, it will expose the unfortunate invisibility and transformational power of black queer diasporic productivity in the visual domain. The launch-point for discussion will be the critical assessment of an art exhibition entitled Precarious Imaging: Visibility and Media Surrounding African Queerness, that was launched in Dakar, Senegal, in May of 2014 as part of “Dak’Art, the 11th Biennale of Contemporary African Art.” This was one of the first exhibitions on the African continent to deal with homosexuality in African visual culture. Although canceled a day after its opening due to intense religious and political pressure, Precarious Imaging became part of a continuing public controversy in Africa on homosexuality. Selected works by artists showcased in the exhibition, who include James Chuchu, Andew Esiebo, and Zanele Muholi, will be discussed as well as relevant works by the American-born artist of Nigerian descent, Adejoke Tugbiyele.

Bio James Smalls, Ph.D. Professor of Art/Design History & Theory Affiliate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies Affiliate Professor of African Studies University of Maryland, Baltimore County

PANEL 17 From Andalusia to Veracruz: The Afrohispanic Presence. Baltasar Fra Molinero (Bates College, Maine, USA) Chair

Karma Frierson (University of Chicago, USA) “The Afro-Andalusian Caribbean in Veracruz/Veracruz in the Afro-Andalusian Caribbean: A View from the Port.” Abstract Although national recognition of Mexico’s Afro-descendant population is only a recent occurrence, those from the port of Veracruz have recognized themselves as part of what scholar Antonio Garcia de Leon has called the Afro-Andalusian Caribbean for quite some time. As Mexico’s major port of entry, the city of Veracruz and its localized iteration of mestizaje differs from the nationalistic ideology of the country and intricately ties it to the greater Caribbean despite being at a geographic remove from region, situated along the Gulf Coast. By claiming an Afro-Caribbean identity locals, known as jarochos, situate themselves in a transnational context with the Puerto Rican jíbaro, the Cuban guajiro, the criollos of Panama, and the llaneros of Colombia and Venezuela. This line of argumentation expands the jarocho type beyond that of being merely Mexican regional type akin to poblanos, yucatecos, and campechanos, highlighting the liminal nature of the port city—it is both Mexican and Afro-Caribbean, even as it uneasily fits into each. That Veracruz is part of the Afro-Andalusian Caribbean has become a social fact among select groups of people, particularly cultural promoters and enthusiasts of the local genres of music, son jarocho, an autochthonous folkloric musical form, and son veracruzano, a local variant of the Cuban-derived music of son montuno. However, as they proclaim a Caribbean identity that is explicitly African and Andalusian, there is little explicit rhetoric regarding the African Diaspora, offering a black internationalism that does not reference Africa even it as it affixes the redundant prefix “Afro–” to the Caribbean. Nevertheless, because the Caribbean is locally coded as black, Veracruz’s self-inscription into the region creates an avenue for associations and affiliations with an abstracted blackness that is considered to be both natural, via ambiguous genealogical roots afforded by racial mixing, and naturalized, as an adopted cultural influence originating in the Caribbean. This paper, therefore, uses Veracruz to explore how conceptions of blackness are made and internalized in a space that is at the confluence of two racial logics—the Mexican mestizaje and the Caribbean mulataje—and the importance of lateral connections for being in the Afrodiasporic condition for a population that does not consider itself to be black. The AfroAndalusian Caribbean as a concept and its functionality within the port city of Veracruz offers a unique interpretation of the African Diaspora and the diasporic condition. Bio Karma Frierson is a PhD candidate in the anthropology department at the University of Chicago. Her research in the port of Veracruz focuses on public space and dancing cultures as a lens through which to analyze understandings of blackness and processes of identification in contemporary Mexico. She graduated from Harvard College, magna cum laude, with a joint degree in African and African American Studies and Social Anthropology in 2009. Ms. Frierson received her master’s degree in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2013. She is a Fulbright Student Scholar, a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, and a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow.

Carmen Fracchia (University College London, England) “The Subjectivity of the Afro-Hispanic Slave-Painter Juan de Pareja in Imperial Spain.” Abstract My paper will argue that deep ethnic prejudices against black slaves and ex-slaves in the crowns of Castile and Aragón did not prevent the emergence of the ‘Afro-Hispanic subject’ in the visual form. It will focus on the extraordinary case of the slave-painter Juan de Pareja (Antequera, c.1606- Madrid, 1670) as cultural producer at the Hapsburg Court in Madrid, the centre of the Spanish empire. I will, however, concentrate in Pareja’s 3-metre long masterpiece The Vocation of St Matthew (1661) completed after ten years of freedom from slavery and one year after the death of his master, the royal painter Diego Velázquez. In this monumental religious painting, that belonged to the Spanish royal collection, Pareja inserts his self-portrait as an European man. I will explore the multilayered processes of the formation of Pareja’s subjectivity, by considering some fundamental factors: the ways in which the Andalucian painter from the diocese of Málaga is indebted to Juan Latino in the articulation of the self as a biblical Ethiopian; to Velázquez’s portrait Juan de Pareja, where his master subverts the restricted canon of the genre of portraiture by representing his slave as a ‘worthy subject’ before Pareja was manumitted in Rome, and, to the experience that Afro- hispanic slaves and ex slaves had of in their collective ‘black nations’ in imperial Spain. Pareja’s The Vocation of St Matthew is currently exhibited to the general audience in the Prado Museum (Madrid), where it was kept in the storage for four centuries.

Bio Senior Lecturer of Early Modern Spanish Visual Studies in the Department of Cultures and Languages, Birkbeck University of London, UK. Her research interest is in early modern Spanish notions of human diversity, religion, slavery and ethnic prejudice, and the ways visual artists articulate subjectivity, slavery, freedom and hybridity. Her work has received considerable international recognition through publications and papers given in international conferences and publications in journals and edited collections in the USA, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Spain, Holland, Ireland, and the UK. Fracchia has been a researcher in three international projects on different aspects of Slavery and Abolitionism in Spain at the University of Granada, Spain (2008-2013), all sponsored by the Spanish government. She has just been invited to deliver a Public Lecturer and a Workshop with the Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture at the University of Chicago in February 2017. Her current book project 'Black but Human': Slavery and Art in Imperial Spain, 1480-1800 explores the emergence of the slave and freed slave subjects in the visual form of Habsburg Spain.

Baltasar Fra Molinero (Bates College, Maine, USA) “Sor Teresa Chicaba: Religious Subjectivity and the Racial Discourse of Eighteenth- Century Spain.” Abstract The text of the Compendio de la Vida Ejemplar de la Venerable Madre Sor Teresa Juliana de Santo Domingo (Salamanca, 1752) constitutes a difficult text to interpret and analyze, being the hagiography of an African woman called Chicaba who, after a long period of enslavement, entered a cloistered monastery in Spain. A critical edition of the translation preceded by two extensive introductory essays prepared by Professor Sue E. Houchins and myself is about to come out. The text presents the translator and critical reader with many ideological traps. They relate to issues of race as understood in eighteenth-century Spain in comparison to those ideologies held in Spanish America. They comprise also the uneasiness of the author, Father Juan Carlos Paniagua, in discussing Sor Teresa Chicaba’s Blackness and former slave status. This circumstance affects Father Paniagua’s discourse on the gender and sexuality of a virginal Black nun whom he intends to promote for sainthood. The interpretation of Sor Teresa Chicaba’s Vida has to be done with the literary technique of the palimpsest. Her voice and personal narrative is buried yet it can be discerned within the racial discourse of a white priest as a counter-discourse that provokes fractures and discontinuities in this hagiographic text. For this reason Professor Houchins and I consider the Vida of Sor Teresa Chicaba an early example of an as-told-to slave narrative that would become part of the genre of slave narratives in the Anglo-American Protestant world. The Vida of Sor Teresa Chicaba, although ostensibly written by a white priest who gave it religious authority, makes constant reference to the African nun’s autobiographical writings and meditations as well as quotes a fragment of one of her poems. Sor Teresa Chicaba was a literate woman who was perfectly familiar with the process of reading and writing saints’ lives in the Catholic tradition. When at the end of her life Father Paniagua, who was not among the several confessors and spiritual directors she had had during her life, approached her to discuss the narrative of her life, she understood that the outcome of these conversations would likely be a hagiographic narrative. Paniagua was at pains to demonstrate the plausibility of a Black female saint, and the result was a text that, even if produced after the death of Sor Teresa Chicaba, was the collaboration between this African woman and her biographer. Added to the importance of this rare early slave narrative in the Catholic world is its diasporic nature, as copies the Vida of Sor Teresa Chicaba traveled to Spanish America in an attempt to be used as an exemplary story. Sor Teresa Chicaba’s Vida is one of the earliest, if not the first, biographies of an African woman written in a modern European language. At present Sor Teresa Chicaba is the object of veneration among Black Catholics in the United States of America.

Bio Baltasar Fra-Molinero is a Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Bates College. In collaboration with Professor Sue E. Houchins he is finishing the critical edition of Black Bride of Christ: Chicaba, An African Nun in Eighteenth-Century Spain (Vanderbilt University Press). He is the author of La imagen de los negros en el teatro del Siglo de Oro (Madrid, Siglo XXI Editores, 1995). His teaching and research focus on the representation of Blacks and race in the Spanish-speaking world. Together with Professor Benita Sampedro Vizcaya he edited the collected poems of Equatorial Guinean writer Raquel Ilombe. Currently he is working on the voices of Black Diasporic people through the archives of the Spanish Inquisition of the Canary Islands.

PANEL 18 Contested Spaces: Mapping Black Gender Performance & Sexual Identity in the US and the Caribbean. Pekka Kilpelainene (University of Eastern, Finland)Chair Philip Ojo: (Agnes Scott College, USA) “Soraya Nini’s Ils dissent que je suis une beurette: Mapping the Spatial Boundaries of Postcolonial Maghrebian Women in Contemporary France.” Abstract As descendants of North African immigrants, Beurs2, and specifically Beurettes3, are strangers in France, their country of birth, and the homeland for most of them. Born and raised in France, thus in theory French citizens, Beurettes are unlike their parents: they do not face basic challenges of otherness, such as learning and adapting to the cultural norms of the host country. Yet, the Maghrebian heritage of Beurettes, including their ethnicity, cultural identity, and gender, create spatial boundaries which cap their potentials and limit their spheres of operation. At home, they feel a sense of enclosure and entrapment resulting from explicit patriarchal control; outside the home, they are subjected to a wide of range of barriers and regulations. These experiences translate into economic disadvantage, displacement and powerlessness, which severely impact the mobility of Beurettes in contemporary French society. These insights are illuminated in an increasing number of postcolonial Francophone North African narratives including Soraya Nini’s Ils disent que je suis une beurette (1993), which provides a powerful illustration of spatial boundaries based on ethnicity, cultural identity, and gender in contemporary France. Within the framework of Soraya Nini’ s literary representation of Beurette life, and drawing upon the theoretical works of Homi Bhabha, Avtar Brah, Stuart Hall, and Jonathan Rutherford, who have emphasized the relationship between ethnicity, cultural identity, gender, and spatial restrictions, this paper seeks to map the spatial boundaries created by the protagonist’s Maghrebian heritage, using the following questions:

1. Given their Maghrebian heritage and the realities of secular French society, how do Beurettes negotiate and/or re-negotiate their space (identity) in contemporary France?

2. How does the adaptation and/or "reinterpretation" of ancestral culture, i.e., cultural practices inherited by Beurettes from first generation Maghrebian parents, affect them?

3. What are the identity negotiation processes (and resources) of Beurettes in contemporary France? For example, how do ethnicity, cultural identity, gender influence Beurettes’ ability to control others' perceptions of their identity?

4. What literary techniques and tools are used in mapping (imagining) the spatial boundaries of Beurettes in the text?

2 Peoples born in France of North African descent. 3 Female Beurs It is hoped that this literary analysis will demonstrate the relevance of Soraya Nini’s Ils disent que je suis une beurette for mankind, particularly within the context of transatlantic connections.

Bio Dr. Philip Ojo teaches French and Francophone studies at Agnes Scott College. His research focuses on Francophone literature with a concentration on Africa and the Caribbean. He is also interested in global issues, particularly migrant experience, as well as expressions of identities and social conditions in popular culture as a platform for criticism, change, and nation building. He has published on the articulation of these issues in fiction, music, cartooning, cinema, and drama. He is currently working on a project on the role of African communities in the transformation of the landscape of European mega-cities. Ojo also maintains http://philipaojo.agnesscott.org/, a website that provides useful information about his personal take on French and Francophone studies.

Simone A. James Alexander (Seton Hall University, New Jersey) “Re/Mapping Diasporic Encounters: Memory, History and the ‘Right to be Heard’ in the Le Livre d’Emma.” Abstract Paul Gilroy ascertains: “Slavery is the site of black victimage and thus of tradition’s intended erasure. When the emphasis shifts towards the elements of invariant tradition that heroically survive slavery, any desire to remember slavery itself becomes something of an obstacle. It seems as if the complexity of slavery and its location within modernity has to be actively forgotten if a clear orientation to tradition and thus to the present circumstances of blacks is to be acquired” (189). Haitian-Canadian novelist, Marie-Célie Agnant’s unrelenting engagement with slavery (and forms of enslavement) not only emphasizes the heroic shift and resistance to slavery, but it also interrogates or, more poignantly challenges the act of forgetting or un-remembering. Inflicted by a “hunger to tell,” to bear witness, an act that demands action, engagement, and remembering, protagonist, Emma Bratte decisively establishes that the story of female slavery and enslavement is not a story to pass on. Registering her (and, by default, her foremother’s traumatic) experiences of slavery as counter narrative to the existing colonial history, Marie-Célie/Emma returns to the past, albeit discursively, to restage a resistance to and acknowledgement of black female exploitation. In his assessment of Agnant’s protagonists, Proulx writes: “Many of [them] assume the role of griot as they become the central figures forming a restorative link between a legendary ancestral past tied to an Afro-Caribbean space” (36). In unsilencing the past, Emma “strategically (re)constructs narrative chains reaching back to her foremothers” reclaiming and valorizing their voices (Proulx 36). Exploring the importance of individual and collective memory and history, this paper examines the modes of resistance Emma and her foremothers chose to combat their subjugation and victimization. Ancestral knowledge is central to maintaining a female continuum and to Emma achieving autonomy. Memory, both personal and collective, aids in the reconstruction and recuperation of the self and the ruptured and turbulent past.

Bio Simone A. James Alexander is Professor of English, Africana Studies and Women and Gender Studies and Director of Africana Studies at Seton Hall University, New Jersey, where she teaches and researches in the areas of Postcolonial literature, African American literature, African literature, Caribbean literature, Russian literature, American Literature and women writers. Professor Alexander is author of the award- winning book African Diasporic Women’s Narratives: Politics of Resistance, Survival and Citizenship (University of Florida Press, 2014; reprinted in paperback, May 2016) that also received honorary mention by the African Literature Association Book of the Year Scholarship Award (2016). She is also the author of Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women (University of Missouri Press, 2001) and co-editor of Feminist & Critical Perspectives on Caribbean Mothering (Africa World Press, 2013). Professor Alexander current projects include Black Freedom in (Communist) Russia: Great Expectations, Utopian Visions and Bodies of (In)Difference: Gender, Sexuality, and Nationhood.

Pekka Kilpelainene: (University of Eastern, Finland) “Queer Spatialities of Cultural Trauma.” Abstract This paper focuses on the issues of cultural and individual trauma in Randall Kenan’s novel A Visitation of Spirits (1989), which traces the trouble-laden cultural spaces and boundaries of blackness and nonnormative sexuality. It depicts the tension between the conservative, heteronormative ideological climate of the fictional community of Tims Creek, North Carolina, and, on the other hand, transgressive queer desire. The protagonist, Horace, an African American adolescent, is devastated as a result of his traumatizing position between the irreconcilable realms of the heteronormative traditions and cultural codes of his community and his nonnormative same-sex desire. The narrative largely centers on Horace’s desperate attempt to come to terms with this conflict by resorting to the supernatural, that is, Native American and African mythologies, black magic, and sorcery. In the process, the mundane places of Tims Creek are revisited both through Horace’s memories and through his hallucinatory, haunted tour through the town. As a result, those places are transformed into queer spaces where at least two master narratives are disrupted: Christianity by black magic, and idealized heteronormativity by the presence of the queer. The tragic outcome of this endeavor leads us to consider the boundaries of oppressive social and cultural structures and our possibilities to envision and implement alternatives to the status quo.

I contend that Horace’s story and his demise may be understood as part of a larger sociohistorical narrative of what I call the history of intersectional oppression of the people of African origin in the United States. In accordance with Paul Gilroy’s notion of the memory of slavery as the common denominator of the black diaspora, I argue that the cultural trauma of slavery and other manifestations of racial subjugation is mediated into different forms of oppression in terms of sexuality and gender, in particular.

Bio Dr. Pekka Kilpeläinen works as an Academy Research Fellow in English Language and Culture at the University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu. His doctoral dissertation focused on the political unconscious of race and sexuality in three novels by James Baldwin. He is currently working on a five-year project, “Narratives of Traumatic Cultural Unconscious: Memory, Space, and Mobility in Contemporary African American Literature,” funded by the Academy of Finland, examining the intersectional manifestations and negotiations of the traumatic cultural memory of slavery in the work of such writers as Bernice L. McFadden, Daniel Black, Randall Kenan, Melvin Dixon, Shay Youngblood, and James Baldwin. His articles have been published in such journals as Atlantic Studies and the European Journal of American Studies. Dr. Kilpeläinen’s research interests include the African diaspora, transculturation and mobility, cultural memory, gender, and queer studies.

17:15-17:30 COFFEE BREAK

5:30-7:00 p.m PARALLEL SESSIONS

PANELS 19-23, 40

PANEL 19 Transnational Roots and Shaping of African Diasporic Culture and Identity. Juan Ignacio Oliva (Universidad de la Laguna, Tenerife, Spain) Chair Juan Ignacio Oliva (Universidad de la Laguna, Tenerife, Spain) “Sensing Place as ‘Home Abroad’ for African Diaspora Poets in the American Continent.” Abstract This paper tackles the notion of identity and familiarity for contemporary African diaspora poets, using the theoretical framework of environmental postcolonialism. In the making of landscape literature–written by émigré, exiled or expatriated authors of African origin, living in the diaspora of the American continent, especially Caribbean, Canada and the US—there can be found some general characteristics that deal with the issue of affiliation vs detachment to the place of reception, among which subjective nostalgia for the lost land, social attraction and/or repulsion for the new one and the problematization of the cultural codes stand as the most debatable of all. Terms such as place, space and territory blur into appropriations and distortions that have to do with the sense of belonging or non-belonging to a specific physical, political and cultural community. Through concrete examples taken from African diaspora poetry, a mosaic of the attachments, urges, drives and phobias regarding sense of place will be established. It is the aim of this paper, therefore, to analyze the ways in which writers, travelling by choice or force reinvent or re-imagine their milieu and their relationship with the environment. In the recreation of landscape (whether real or imaginary, birthplace or land of choice) cultural knowledge plays an important role in portraying the reality of place. Following Chinese-American theoretician Yi Fu-Tuan’s concept of “topophilia,” the process of uprooting proves both intense and problematic. Decoding and recoding space and territory can derive in curious appropriations and distortions of the landscape, seen in a paradoxical status as terra incognita, land of promise, but also as a locus alienus and a hostile land. Thus, using travelling metaphors found in the confessional literature of South Asian writers living in Canada and the US as good exempla, three main paradoxes will be studied in reference to body/mind transformations, namely, 1) paradise lost: the subjectivity of landscape, 2) Travelling nowhere: bodies, boundaries and borders, and 3) Commodified Paralysis: Existential dystopia. For this purpose, already familiar concepts, such as Salman Rushdie’s “imaginary homelands,” Lawrence Buell’s “environmental justice” or Val Plumwood’s “materialist spirituality of place,” will be revisited, and hypotheses will be stated to guess whether there is a possibility of establishing literary loci, to achieve real and solid environmental places for the travellers. Finally, examples taken from Gwendolyn Brooks (“To the Diaspora,” “A Sunset of the City”), Jean Binta Breeze (“Testament”), Louise Bennett (“Pickney”), Audre Lorde (“Power”) or Claude McKay (“The Tropics in New York,” “Harlem Shadows,” “America”), among others, will be chosen as appropriate case studies for the spatial use of identification in their poems.

Bio Dr Juan Ignacio Oliva is a Full Professor of the Faculty of Humanities at the Universidad de La Laguna (Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain), where he currently teaches Postcolonial Anglophone Literatures at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. He has published extensively on contemporary authors, such as Salman Rushdie, Shyam Selvadurai, Sunetra Gupta, Jamie O’Neill, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Abelardo Delgado, Ricardo Sánchez, and others. He is also presently the Head of La Laguna Center for Canadian Studies, and the current editor of Canadaria (Revista Canaria de Estudios Canadienses) and RCEI (Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses). He was elected President of EASLCE (the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and the Environment in the period 2014-16), and is currently President of AEEII (Spanish Association of Interdisciplinary Studies about India).

Claudine Raynaud (Paul-Valéry University, Montpellier III, France) “A Full blooded African”?: Sojourner Truth’s Elusive Exoticism.”

Abstract “I am African, *…+ you can see that plain enough” (Sojourner Truth’s America, p. 9) This paper will investigate Sojourner Truth’s African “identity” through a thorough examination of various claims to her African heritage. It will also confront 19th century exoticism to historically based, yet ideologically motivated, readings of Truth that replace her within an African lineage. Such interpretations run counter to her gradual appropriation as African American: a black heroic female figure that American feminists and the entire country can celebrate in an inclusive gesture that strengthens and constructs the image of the American “nation”. The first one emerges from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s statement that Truth, when she met her, was a “full blooded African” (“The Libyan Sibyl,” 1863). Truth was born in the United States from James Bomfree and Elizabeth or “Betsy”: she had not been directly imported from Africa and her grandmother on her father’s side may have been Native American (Mohawk Indian). In Stowe’s depiction, Truth’s African-ness derives from her projecting 19th century aesthetics and exotic notions onto that unusual female ex- slave. She compares Truth’s physical appearance to two statues: Charles Cumberworth’s “Marie à la fontaine” (1840s), a young woman carrying a jug, and explains how her description of Truth led sculptor William Wetmore Story (1819-1895) to conceive his work “The Libyan Sibyl” (1861) with Sojourner in mind. The second claim rests on a reading of her religious faith and her vocation as public speaker on the abolitionist circuit in favor of women’s rights. Her contemporary biographers, and most notably Margaret Washington (Sojourner Truth’s America, 2009), have gradually re-read the Dutch Protestant environment of her childhood as imbued with traits stemming from a Congolese African heritage, tinted with Catholicism. Truth’s mother Mau-Mau Beth was from the central West African region of Kongo, north of Angola, and her father came most probably from the inland Gold Coast (present-day Ghana). Washington states that “Truth’s African born grandparents provided a connection to the spirituality and the cultural provenance of the Motherland” (Sojourner Truth’s America, p. 11). Drawing on these findings, she ventures that Truth should be seen as a figure of the African griot. My position is that projections, identifications, and ideologies ultimately generate tensions that run through attempts to translate and define the subject’s otherness at the expense of an access to the self.

Bio

Professor of English and American Studies at Paul-Valéry University, Montpellier III, has taught in England (Birmingham and Liverpool) and the United States (Michigan, Northwestern and Oberlin). A Fellow at the Du Bois Institute (Harvard, Fall 2005), she was vice president of the CEAA when Michel Fabre was its president, has headed GRAAT, the nationwide African American Studies Research Group in Tours and works at the CNRS. She is the author of Toni Morrison: L’Esthétique de la survie (1995) and numerous articles on black autobiography (Hurston, Wright, Baldwin, Lorde), Joyce and feminist theory. Her publications include ‘Coming of Age in the African American Novel’, The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel (2004), an anthology of articles on Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (CRAFT, 2005), ‘Beloved or the Shifting Shapes of Memory’, The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison (2007), the co-edition of collection of essays on Gloria Naylor (l’Harmattan, 2012) and a book chapter on Hurston’s Tell my Horse in F. Sweeney and K. Marsh eds., Afromodernisms, Paris, Harlem and the Avant-Garde, Edinburgh UP, 2013. She has just translated Sojourner Truth’s Narrative into French.

Leonor María Martinez Serrano (University of Córdoba, Spain) “Memory, Forgetting and Desire in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Fiction.” Abstract Memory is an anthropological universal: civilizations across the five continents have experienced loss, suffering and trauma since antiquity and they have tried hard to understand whatever lessons History had to teach them. In spite of the centrality of the Holocaust in our Western frame of mind, horror is ubiquitous. Africa in particular is marked by a rich and dynamic history spanning millennia, as well as by a historical complexity that bears on its literatures. Africa was the birthplace of human societies and home to many splendorous ancient civilizations, but also a polyglot continent where lots of human voices are heard in a wide spectrum of languages. Its history has been shaped by contact with others through great migrations, wars, slavery and slave trade, colonialism, the Cold War, the waxing and waning of state systems, trade and commerce, and even post-colonialism, which is the most recent chapter in the history of many African countries. The 20th century witnessed a decisive shift from colonialism to post-colonialism, which is to say a shift towards the emergence of independent state members with their own decision-making structures. In today’s world, Africa is also fashioned by such forces as globalization at a world-wide scale, migration, the increasing mobility of the world population, and the impact of the so-called ICT. Similarly, the concept of diaspora is crucial to a proper understanding of African literature: lots of African authors live outside of Africa, lots of African authors write their work in indigenous languages or choose to write it in English to reach a larger audience.

In this respect, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of the most outstanding Nigerian novelists and short-story writers writing in English nowadays. The author, who divides her time between Nigeria and the USA, is a paradigmatic example of what diaspora represents. She has written three widely acclaimed novels so far –Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) and Americanah (2013)–, as well as a collection of poems titled Decisions (1997), the play For Love of Biafra (1998), and a number of short stories, essays and poems published in prominent literary journals, magazines and newspapers. The Thing Around Your Neck (2009) remains a powerful statement on memory and on her own personal experience of diaspora in the United States. In actual fact, memory is a central concern in her fiction: her novels and short stories are pervaded by memories of suffering and loss against a historical background of decolonization. After all, memory is a survival mechanism: humans need to know where they come from so that they know where they might be heading towards. But forgetting is likewise essential for the psychological well-being of human communities and individuals. Because humans are vulnerable in the face of historical events, because they are finite and exposed, they need to learn how to forget the horrors of the past. Literature might well serve the purpose of catharsis. It has been doing so for centuries on end. It comes then as no surprise that memory should be such a central concern in contemporary culture and politics. In this paper we shall look at such concepts as memory, forgetting and desire, which are essential to the life of any individual and community, and at race and experiences of diaspora as portrayed in the fiction of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, particularly in the short stories in The Thing Around Your Neck.

Bio Leonor María Martínez Serrano works as a Lecturer in the Department of English and German Philology at the University of Córdoba, where she pursued her doctoral studies and gained a PhD on Canadian Literature in 2012. She is a member of the research group Writs of Empire: Poetics and Politics in Modern and Contemporary Literatures in English at the University of Córdoba too. Her research interests include world poetry (European, American and Canadian poetry), Canadian Literature, High Modernism, Narratives in English, First Nations and Oral Literatures, Literary Theory, Linguistics, Philosophy & Ecology, Literary Translation, and Comparative Literature. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Toronto, University of British Columbia (Vancouver), University of the West of Scotland (UK), and University of Bialystok (Poland). She has taken part in innumerable international conferences, where she has read papers on her research interests.

PANEL 21 Between Imagination and Agency: The Development of African Diasporic Identity and Narratives. Dexter Gabriel (Stony Brook University, NY, USA) Chair

Melissa L. Cooper (Rutgers University-Newark, USA) “Sapelo Island’s Bilali Mohammed and Competing Vision of an Enslaved African Muslim in Coastal Georgia.” Abstract One only needs to look to the evolution of the many narratives of Bilali Mohammed’s life to be reminded of how prominent contemporary ideas and trends have been in shaping perspectives about Sapelo Islanders’ folk culture. Depicted as an example of coastal Georgia’s “Arabian type” and a respected slave driver by Joel Chandler Harris in the 1890s, cast as exotic evidence of the Islanders’ African past in Lydia Parrish’s and Mary Granger’s works during the interwar years, and imagined as a devout African Muslim defiantly holding on to his religion in black women’s fictions in the 1980s and 1990s, Sapelo Island’s famed ancestor has been offered as the embodiment of a variety of discourses. In each period, accounts about Mohammed, and the characters he inspired, change according to the popular ideas about black people’s connection to Africa and their past. This paper examines the aforementioned trends, paying close attention to the way that Mohammed has lived in the imagination of all who have pondered the meaning of his Africanness and Muslimness. Bio Melissa L. Cooper earned her Masters and PhD in History from Rutgers University. Cooper will be returning to Rutgers University’s Newark campus as a professor of history in the fall of 2016. She specializes in African American cultural and intellectual history, and the history of the African Diaspora. Cooper's current manuscript titled, Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination is forthcoming (University of North Carolina Press, April 2017). Cooper is the author of Instructor's Resource Manual--Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 2013) and a contributor to Race and Retail: Consumption Across the Color Line (Rutgers University Press, 2015).

Dexter Gabriel (University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA) “Without Regard to Colour:” Visions of Freedom in the Report of Messrs. Peck and Price and the British Emigration Scheme, 1839-1840.” Abstract Between 1839 to 1840 colonial agents from British Guiana, Trinidad and Jamaica embarked on a tour of the Northeastern United States in a search for labor. Setting up offices in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, these agents sought to entice free African-Americans to settle in the emancipated British West Indies colonies. Reaction within free African-American communities was mixed. For many black activists and abolitionists, this was too similar to the colonization schemes of the American Colonization Society. For others, the British West Indian colonies provided a possible alternative to circumscribed freedom in the United States. In December 1839, two black delegates, Nathaniel Peck and Thomas Price, were selected to travel to British Guiana and Trinidad. The purpose of the trip was to examine the country, judge for themselves and “report to their brethren” the state of the colonies, the status of the former slaves, and the prospects for emigration. Their testimony, delivered upon their return in 1840, was turned into a pamphlet with the intent of encouraging fellow African-Americans to find work, prosperity and equality in the British West Indies. This paper examines Peck and Price’s expedition through the context of nineteenth-century black emigrationism and the growing role of the emancipated British Caribbean within an increasingly transnational American abolitionism. It as well examines how Peck and Price conducted their expedition, the elements on which they placed primacy, their methodology and their dissemination of findings—part travel narrative and part scientific research—as belonging to a distinct black intellectual tradition within emigrationist thought and rhetoric. This paper contributes to the ongoing conversation of migration as a major component of slavery, freedom and emancipation within the Black Atlantic.

Bio

Dr. Dexter Gabriel earned his Ph.D. in history from Stony Brook University-New York. His research interests include the history of bondage, resistance, and freedom in the Black Atlantic, as well as interdisciplinary approaches to slavery within popular culture and media. His current research explores British Emancipation in the Anglo-Caribbean and its impact on abolitionist strategies in nineteenth-century North America. He is jointly-appointed faculty with History and the African Studies Institute at the University of Connecticut.

PANEL 22 Weary Wanderers: The Elusive Quest for Home in African American Literature. Patrycja Kurjatto Renard (Independent Scholar, Poland/France)Chair

Françoise N. Hamlin(Brown University, Rhode Island, USA) “Trauma in Motion: Anne Moody and Coming of Age in Mississippi.” Abstract There is a photograph of Anne Moody, an African American Tougaloo College student in Jackson, Mississippi, at the downtown Woolworth’s lunch counter in 1963. She sits with two white protesters, Joan Trumpauer and John Salter, and behind them a mob of young white men gleefully pour condiments on all three while hurling insults and deadly threats. This iconic image represents both the bravery and rage propelling that era’s black freedom struggles in the nation. Five years later in 1968 Anne Moody published Coming of Age in Mississippi, chronicling her childhood and activism in the Mississippi movement with blunt and powerful prose. This renowned and often assigned book, brilliantly relays the stark events of the mass movement. She calmly describes terror, pain, intense fear, complete exhaustion, and mental breakdown. Yet Anne Moody slipped into obscurity by choice, refusing to give interviews or appear in public. Rumors swirled about her life after Mississippi. Like Mrs. Rosa Parks, she became the symbol of that one moment in time – preserved like a fossil in amber. She died quietly on 5 February 2015 in Mississippi, aged 74. I propose a paper that considers trauma and flight. Moody moves around a lot in her lifetime – fleeing from perceived dangers and her own realities. She continued to suffer emotionally from her harrowing experiences on the frontlines in Mississippi, wounds that never fully healed and followed her throughout her life. There were many like her, although she is one of the extreme casualties. This paper and the larger project demands a drastic rethinking of the black freedom struggle away from the triumphalist narrative toward a nuanced assessment of the prices paid by young activists and the difficulties in movement- building.I have not yet figured out my thesis, but I will in the next few months as I continue to read and write. This is the beginning of a book length project about trauma and activism and the CAAR audience will bring diverse yet informed opinions to this worksin-progress. Bio Françoise Hamlin is an Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at Brown University where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in U.S. history, race, and culture. She is the author of Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), Her most notable fellowships and awards include: Huggins-Quarles Award, Organization of American Historians (2002); Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney Fellowship, Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan (2004-5); C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize, Southern Historical Association (2005); Franklin L. Riley Dissertation Prize, Mississippi Historical Society (2006); Charles Warren Center Fellowship, Harvard University (2007-2008); Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty (2010-2011).

Patrycja Kurjatto Renard: (Independent Scholar, Poland/France) “The Departure and the Return to Ancestor’s land: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.” Abstract I would like to discuss the trope of migration in Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (2016). This first novel by a young Ghanaian-American woman writer blends the accounts of two branches of the same family, starting with twin sisters, Effia and Esi, who do not know each other and whose lives follow opposite courses: one stays in Africa while the other is sold into slavery. Both, however, are involved in intercourse with white people and in the slave trade, although the circumstances are quite different. Both migrate and are agents and witnesses of migration. Each chapter shows episodes in the lives of the twin sisters and their offspring, until the time when more than two hundred years later their descendants, Marcus and Marjorie, meet, not knowing that they are distant relatives. The paper will discuss the first two and the last two chapters, with a special focus on the such elements as separation by water, memory objects and Cape Coast Castle as different emblems of migration.

The curse of separation by water: according to a saying quoted in chapter 2 of the novel, the twin sisters are doomed to be separated by water; which is what happens to Effia and Esi. The curse extends to the subsequent eight generations of the family, until the moment when Marcus and Marjorie, both raised in America, meet and travel back to Ghana

The twin black golden dusted stones that both Effia and Esi receive as their mother's legacy, mute objects whose meaning is lost to the owners but that nevertheless connect the generations. However, while Effia keeps her stone and passes it on, Esi is forced to abandon hers: it remains buried in the dungeon of Cape Coast Castle where she is kept before sailing to America.

Cape Coast Castle connects the four characters as the site they all enter, as the element of family reunification and separation, as the emblem of forgetting and understanding, of leaving the homeland and of returning to the ancestors' land. It is shown as a living place, a prison, and a tourist attraction, its ambiguity further reinforced by the sections in which Ghanaian-born Marjorie is confronted by a local boy who wants to cheat her into paying a non-existent entrance fee. And yet, all above-mentioned characters pay dearly for entering that place. In the end though, it appears to offer a possibility of liberation: while visiting the dungeons of Cape Coast Castle, possibly the one where the mother of his family line was kept and where she had hidden her gold dusted black stone, Marcus feels so sick he flees the place, leaving it through the door of no return. When Marjorie follows him, they both enter the ocean and while swimming, she offers him her gold dusted stone, which closes the novel on a promise of redemption and reconciliation.

Bio Patrycja Kurjatto Renard is a Polish-born independent scholar living in France who earned her PhD from the University François Rabelais in Tours, France. Her research interests include contemporary women's novel, immigrants' and ethnic minorities' representation in fiction, identity quests, African American literature, Asian American and Native American literature. She has written numerous articles and presented at numerous conferences. She belongs to such research associations as CAAR (The Collegium for African American Research), MESEA and EAAS (European Association for American Studies).

Vincent Cucarella: (Univerity of Valencia, Spain) “Parallel Journeys across the Black Atlantic: Weaving a Tapestry of Resilience and Mismatched Black Subjectivities between Africa and the US in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing.” Abstract The novel Homegoing (2016) by Ghanaian-born African American writer Yaa Gyasi has drawn attention for having two sides of a Black family running on a platform that oscillates between Africa and the US. The story revolves around the two half-sisters Effia and Esi who are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. As the story unfolds they are separated by what Isabel Wilkerson calls “the unhealed ruptures of slavery” in her review of the novel for The New York Times. Taking this incident as the initial departure, Homegoing follows the parallel whereabouts of the two sisters and traces a two-sided ontological journey across The Black Atlantic. The story showcases the conflicting nature that has accompanied the identity-building process for Black people in these two interwoven continents. Following the literary style of Alex Haley’s landmark novel Roots, and published almost exactly 40 years after Roots’ first printing, Homegoing’s arc builds upon Roots to expand the legacy of slavery through linked narratives that play out a genealogical history of Blackness equally wedded to those twined legacies of conflict and ambivalence that inevitably interconnect Africa and the US. In so doing, Gyasi tracks Black history from the Middle Passage to the Great Migration alongside the alluring period of the Harlem Renaissance and beyond. Sweeping the transcultural history of Black people, the novel manages to visualize the “Ellisonian [or else invisible] ‘ectoplasmatic’ presence”, citing George Elliot Clarke’s coinage, that historically revolves around the subjectivity of Black identity, disputes the African American salient position in the African diaspora and succeeds in portraying a wider scope of the cultural framework of the Black Atlantic. In a way that is reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s insistence on the significance of what she calls an Africanist persona through which American identity has been shaped, the novel's didacticism and plunge into the history and legacy of slavery at both sides of the Atlantic clearly aims to show how the Black presence has determined the construction of a global White identity. Drawing on scholars who have delved into the politics of representation of Black people, such as Fannon, Gilroy or Warren, this paper reads Homegoing in tune with noted activist and lecturer Ewuare Osayande’s new reading of the “DuBoisian twoness/duality”, as he calls it, to demonstrate the novel’s engagement with the idea of a rehabilitated Black epistemology best described as an “ever-evolving self-awareness as a people” that “must be coupled with an ever- evolving awareness of the world around us and which we are co-habitants therein” (Osayande). To this end, I submit that this transnational Black subjectivity that the novel problematizes has been upheld, to a large extent, due to an ethics of resilience (as propounded by Rutter, Luthar or Masten) that has salvaged the representation of Blackness and has helped to rethink and recompose the subjectivity of Black people in a globalized era.

Bio Vicent Cucarella-Ramon (BA in English) (MA, PhD in English) is currently an Adjunct Lecturer of Enlish at the University of València. His research interests focus mainly on African American and African Canadian literatures. His recent articles on Black female writers such as Hannah Crafts, Bernice McFadden, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Djanet Sears or Esi Edugyan appear in Journals such as Canada and Beyond or International Journal of English Studies.

PANEL 23 Giving Voice to the Voiceless: Black Cinema, Theater and the Black Arts Aesthetics. Page Laws (Norfolk state University, Virginia) Chair

Paola Prieto López: (University of Oviedo, Spain) “There is Black in the Union Jack: Staging Black Britain in Bola Agbaje’s Plays.” Abstract Postcolonial and intercultural theatre have mainly focused on the works produced in the former colonies or on the combination of elements taken from different cultures in theatre productions, leaving aside an important part of what is being put on the stage (Griffin, 2004; Griffin, 2006). Black migrants experience is an undeniable part of British contemporary history. Yet the theatre produced by black migrants and the African diaspora within Europe has been largely ignored. It is my intention to fill this void and examine the theatrical contributions by black migrant playwrights in England by analysing how they narrate and perform their own experiences of migration and reflect on female subjectivity and the multiplicity of identities in multicultural Britain. In the past few decades, theatre venues like Trycicle Theatre, Oval House or the Royal Court Theatre and as well as black theatre companies such as Talawa or Nitro Theatre Company, have started producing the work of second and third generation migrants in Britain, providing spaces of encounter and bringing black British voices to the mainstream. Drawing on Griffin’s work on Black and Asian playwrights and their theatricalisation of experiences of black migrant identity in England (Griffin 2004; Godiwala 2006; Goddard 2014), I will analyse the theatrical productions by the award winning British playwright of Nigerian origin Bola Agbaje. By examining the plays Gone Too Far (2007), Detaining Justice (2009) and Belong (2012), I will explore their contribution to the assertion of an Afro-British identity that subverts stereotypical and patriarchal views imposed on the migrant. I argue that these two plays are not only transgressing physical boundaries, as they are entering a predominantly white-male space as it is the British stage, but also putting at stake contemporary issues such as racism, migration and belonging that are rewritten and reinterpreted from the migrant perspective while inscribing them as an integral part of British society. These productions can be conceived as a vindication for the necessity of a new national identity that incorporates these voices and bodies, while reclaiming a space for black playwrights on the British stage.

Bio Paola Prieto Lopez is currently a Marie-Curie early stage researcher for the EU project GRACE (Gender and Cultures of Equality), working on “migrant and diasporic productions of gender equality”. Paola holds a Bachelor’s degree in English Philology by the University of Oviedo and a MA in Language Pedagogy with a focus on LatinAmerican literature by the University of Utah. She is also part of the research group Intersections: Literatures, cultures and contemporary theories at the University of Oviedo. Her research interests include English and postcolonial literature, drama, diaspora and gender studies.

Rosa Branca Figueiredo: (Polytechnic Institute of Guarda, Portugal) “Diasporic Encounters: Space, time and Intertextuality in the African post-colonial theatre.”

Abstract Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian laureate playwright, is an artist whose impact on his environment is unquestionable. He is a product of communities characterized by a viable traditional base, whose original structure and symbolism had been altered by contact with the forces of colonialism. Soyinka has nonetheless successfully married Yoruba mythology with contemporary Afrocentricity and Eurocentricism. Space, time and intertextuality surface as the playwright’s critical literary tools. Heroes in a contradictory culture and space are Soyinka’s specialty. Torn between the Western and the African worlds, his symbolic protagonists play hero, villain, and fool for audiences all too often unaware of his mythic complexity. In his plays, both the destructive and creative aspects of tradition, and of modernity, are dramatized. Before we can think of choosing between past and present, we are forced to arbitrate between the positive and negative elements, first of earlier times, and then of contemporary life and from this complex pattern of contradictions we are offered the chance to form a new vision. The ideologies of geographical space (the West as well as of Africa) have thus demanded Soyinka create protagonists who can answer to prejudices of the times. Heroes on the fringe, on the edge of the world, dance and laugh and die before Soyinka’s audiences. These heroes are the cult heroes who view and react to the oppressive ideologies from their days on the marginal boundary line.

Bio Affiliation: Polytechnic Institute of Guarda, Portugal Academic Position: Associate Professor Education: Ph.D. in Theatre Studies, University of Lisbon; M.A. in English Literature Studies, University of Lisbon; researcher in the Centre of Theatre Studies at the University of Lisbon.

Allison Carter: (Rowan University, USA) “Stand-up Comedy in Two Diasporas: Richard Pryor and Jackie Mason.”

Abstract This paper uses the concept of Stuart Hall’s understanding of interpretive codes, the Althusserian concept of interpellation, and DuBois’ notion of double consciousness to explore the work of African American comedian Richard Pryor and Jewish comedian Jackie Mason and their evocations of racial/ethnic difference. John Limon claims that stand-up comedy stands up “the abject,” that which the dominant culture excludes in order to constitute itself. Kara Hunt complicates the analysis of stand-up comedy by criticizing the “Pryor Standard” as “crowd*ing+ out scenarios in which black comics, to include Pryor himself, can indicate racial irreconcilability.” She recommends a reconsideration of comedians such as Pigmeat Martin and Jackie “Moms” Mabley who brandished the “performance of black private humor minus the restraints of outsider interpretation.” Elliott Oring understands Jewish humor as conditioned by a “background of suffering” and humor as a survival skill that could be interpreted as “transcendent…defensive, or…pathological.” This paper interrogates the notion of double consciousness, especially in its relation to the awareness and play of stereotypes, as they are articulated in the stand-up comedy of the African and Jewish diasporas. The analysis in this paper situates the comedic practices of Pryor and Mason in their socio-historical framework with special emphasis on the diasporic conditions that inform both their comedy and their receptive audiences and in relation to the comedic practices of other African and Jewish American comedians.

Bio Professorin the sociology department at Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ

PANEL 40. Global Diasporas, Local Presences: Making Homespace through Art Performance and Literature in the Black Atlantic ( IBAR I) Jade Montserrat (Institute for Black Atlantic Research UCLAN, Preston, UK) Chair

Jade Montserrat: (Institute for Black Atlantic Research UCLAN, Preston, UK) “Communion: Concealed Expectations, Emerging Dialogues”

Abstract Taking the performance Communion as a starting point the paper will explore understandings and representations of vanity: the ritual of ‘preening’ and ‘fixing’ hair, taken from a framework concerned with colonialism; organized religion; mass identity and an ‘ironing out’ or ‘smoothing over’ of cultural difference and individuality; activities performed silently and privately for the benefit of visibly conforming. Communion forms part of a body of work relating to artist Jade Montserrat's The Rainbow Tribe project: researching ownership of the body and persona, representations and possible manipulations of the body through a quest for equality and freedom. Essentially, the project is looking at radical approaches to freedom: of expression, of speech, to actively participate as community.

Bio

Jade Montserrat studied at Courtauld Institute of Art (2003) and Norwich School of Art and Design, MA Drawing (2010). Jade works at the intersections of art and activism, progressing through performance and live art, works on paper and interdisciplinary projects. Jade works collaboratively with Network 11, Press Room, the Conway Cohort and Rainbow Tribe:Affectionate Movement Recent selected screenings and performances include Panolopy Lab, Brooklyn (2016), The Kitchen, New York (2016), 198 Gallery (2016), Spill Festival (2016), Steakhouse, Rich Mix (2016), IBAR UCLAN (2016), Princeton University (2016), Durham University (2016), Latitude Festival (2015), Conway Hall (2015), Steakhouse, ArtsAdmin (2015), Iniva (2014), Performance ]s p a c e[ (2014)

Andrea Sillis (IBAR, UCLAN, UK) “Alternative Narratives of Home in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy” Abstract This paper discusses Toni Morrison's ninth novel, A Mercy (2008), from the perspective of its examination of the making of 'homespace' in seventeenth-century North America. The geographical and historical setting of this novel allowed Morrison to explore the global displacement of people that was initiated by European colonization and the establishment of the Atlantic slave trade. In an interview on A Mercy, Morrison described the seventeenth century as a period when 'what we now call America was fluid, ad hoc, a place where countries from all over the world were grabbing land and resources, and all sorts of people were coming here.'1 This diasporic history of colonization and enslavement is central to the novel's conception, which interweaves the experiences of multiple characters of European, African and Native American descent. The 'fluidity' that Morrison discerned in this period refers not just to the mass movement of peoples, however, but also to the multiple forms of intercultural encounters that resulted from the convergence of these diverse worldviews. A Mercy explores those encounters through the intensely personal narratives of the disparate group of characters that she imagines living at close quarters on the farm of the Anglo- Dutch settler, Jacob Vaark. In many of the interviews that she gave around the time the novel was published, Morrison stated that her intention was to explore the diverse populations of colonial America at a time before the condition of slavery was tied exclusively to skin colour, and her novel reflects the experience of both free and indentured Europeans, free and enslaved Africans, enslaved Native Americans and free Native Americans undergoing dispossession and genocide. Whilst race is, inevitably, central to the life stories of these characters, the very localized and domestic setting of A Mercy allows Morrison to consider the role that was also played by class, gender, sexuality and religion in the evolution of the relationships that developed between the characters on the farm, and in their encounters with other communities in the locale. In this paper, I will argue that it is precisely this focus on the personal and domestic that allowed her to construct what Valerie Babb has described as ‘an American origins narrative that re-places the racial, gender, and class complexities lost in the creation of a canonical narrative that sought to privilege the few over the many' (147).2 In doing so, she counters the whitewashing of the official myth of North American historical origins, and also offers a more nuanced account of what it means to be at home in the context of this diasporic history. Bio

Andrea Sillis is a PhD student at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK, based in the Institute of Black Atlantic Research (IBAR). Her research focuses on the temporal signatures of cultural and political forms. She is currently completing a thesis on forms of time and typologies of culture in the work of Toni Morrison. Yvonne Reddick: (IBAR, UCLAN, UK) “Carnets de Voyage: Antoine-Roger Bolamba’s Journeys from the Congo to the Metropole”

Abstract

Antoine-Roger Bolamba (1913-2000) was a Congolese journalist, poet and political activist. His Carnets de voyage (Travel Notebooks, 1945-59 ) detail his journeys within the Congo and abroad at a time when mobility was severely controlled by the colonial regime. This paper analyses his accounts of his journeys within his homeland and to Belgium.

Bolamba’s travel articles were published under colonial censure in the magazine La Voix du Congolais. He was obliged to mitigate his criticisms of the regime as a result. Nevertheless, his work succeeds not only in subtly indicting Belgian practices, but in quoting criticisms of them from the work of European authors. An intriguing dialogue with European writers occurs when he cites the work authors from nineteenth century poet Baudelaire to colonial explorer de Mathelin de Papigny. This creates a subtly subversive picture of the Congo under Belgian rule, while affording important insights on creolisation in his work. This paper includes some of the first English translations of sections from Bolamba’s travel articles, and deploys research on his archive at the Bibliothèque royale, Belgium.

Bio

Yvonne Reddick is Research Fellow in Modern English and World Literatures at the University of Central Lancashire, concurrently with a lectureship in Creative Writing. She researches engagements with environmental issues in British and postcolonial literature. Her book on Ted Hughes's environmentalism will be published by Palgrave Macmillan later in 2017. Yvonne Reddick’s articles on postcolonial ecocriticism and the black diaspora are published in journals such as Wasafiri, with work on environmental justice in the Niger Delta and Congolese authors’ presentation of place forthcoming. Her second book project focuses on issues of the local and global in contemporary environmental poetry, analysing issues of mobility, groundlessness, ethnicity and nationality. Awards that Yvonne Reddick has received for her poetry include a Northern Writer’s Award, the Mslexia Magazine Women’s Pamphlet Prize and a Hawthornden Fellowship.

19:15-20:15 Melba Joyce Boyd reading from her book, Death Dance of a Butterfly

Bio

Dr. Melba Joyce Boyd is a Distinguished Professor in African American Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit, and an Adjunct Professor in Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor. She is an award-winning author or editor of 13 books, nine of which are poetry. Death Dance of a Butterfly received the 2013 Library of Michigan Notable Books Award for Poetry, Roses and Revolutions: The Selected Writings of Dudley Randall received the 2010 Independent Publishers Award, the 2010 Library of Michigan Notable Books Award for Poetry, and was a Finalist for the 2010 NAACP Image Award for Poetry and the 2010 ForeWord Award for Poetry. She wrote the official poem for the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, which is inscribed in the museum dedication wall.

THURSDAY, 15 JUNE

9:00-10:30 a.m PARALLEL SESSIONS

PANELS 24-29

PANEL 24 Re-Imagining of the Classic and Neo-Slave Narratives. Richard Yarborough (University of California, Los Angeles, USA) Chair

Richard Yarborough: (University of California, Los Angeles, USA) “Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Europe / Europe in Onkel Toms Hütte.” Abstract In March of 1852, the controversial novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Northern white writer Harriet Beecher Stowe was published and ignited an astounding public response unique in the history of American literature. Frederick Douglass reported that the first edition of five thousand was gone in four days. Ten thousand were snapped up in the first week of release; in one year Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold more than three hundred thousand copies. Stowe’s book has for well over a century and a half exerted incalculable influence on how blackness is constructed in both the American imagination. And the ways in which her work has been interpreted, revised, and challenged in American literature, drama, and film reflect the complex, conflicted white attitudes toward blacks. The massive impact of this novel can be discerned in a range of artistic modes, particularly cinema, with Thomas Edison Company’s 1903 production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin an early example. Indeed, roughly ten film adaptations of the book appeared in the United States between 1903 and 1927. Later in the century, the story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin with its sentimental lionization of passive black martyrdom in the face of violent racist oppression was understandably distasteful to many people at a historical moment when black self-assertion and militancy were increasingly the order of the day. Nonetheless, the problematic legacy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the United States remains evident even in the latter half of the twentieth century, with treatments of the novel tending to be harshly critical (often though satire) or radically revisionist. The remarkable response of mid-nineteenth-century readers to Stowe’s novel also spread quickly to Europe. According to Ronald Patkus and Mary Schlosser, “More than a million and a half copies were sold in England alone in the year after its publication . . . . 14 German editions appeared in 1852, and in 1853 17 French editions and 6 Portuguese editions appeared.” Clearly, the novel touched countless readers outside the United States who knew relatively little about Southern slavery and who may never have personally encountered a black person. The afterlife of Stowe’s masterwork has persisted in Europe as well. A minor but telling example is the fact that there is a U-Bahn station in Berlin named “Onkel Toms Hütte.” My focus in this paper is on one cinematic manifestation of the ongoing fascination with Stowe’s political melodrama—a multinational European film released in 1965 under the German title Onkel Toms Hütte and somewhat later in the United States as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In addition to touching upon the production history of this European movie and its American reception, I analyze the strategies utilized by the filmmakers in adapting Stowe’s novel for the screen. Doing so offers a compelling case study of the transnational circulation of ideas not just about blackness but about the complex ways in which the history of African slavery is memorialized through popular culture.

Bio Richard Yarborough is Professor of English and African American literature and a Faculty Research Associate with the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also an editor of The Heath Anthology Of American Literature.

Malgorzata Zióleck-Sowinska: (Warsaw University, Poland) “The Story of the Exodus and the Images of the Promised Land in the Poetry of African American Spirituals.” Abstract Since the beginning of slavery blacks discovered in the Bible stories which provided not only narratives and language to delineate the difficulty of being a slave, but also hope for a better future in the afterlife. The Exodus was perceived as the Bible’s main argument that God denounced slavery and would come in a catastrophic event to judge those who mistreated blacks. This paper is devoted to the exploration of the biblical figure of Exodus as a recurring trope in selected lyrics of slave spirituals as well as blues spirituals performed by bluesmen in the twentieth century. Scholars seem to agree that the Exodus is the migration narrative, but in this paper I seek to demonstrate that it may also represent the theme of going on a spiritual journey to the other side in the hereafter or the New Jerusalem — the end of time city. Spirituals such as “We Will March” and “Marching up the Heavenly Road” will be discussed to show the religious and martial spirit of black soldiers. In the discussions of images of heaven my overall argument is that the eschatological hope to be delivered from the horrible conditions of slavery and to have a chance for a better world in the Promised Land, embedded in the slave religion, is sounded in the poetry of spirituals. Selected spirituals will be discussed to reveal the persistence of these themes. They include “All Over This World,” I Want to Walk in Jerusalem Just Like John,” “My Father, How Long? and “New Jerusalem.” In the case of spirituals recorded by blues musicians, I want to argue that they projected the image of heaven as the place of eternal rest in the Kingdom of God in the land beyond death. For a number of them death was not the end of human existence, but it was a vehicle of obtaining a further spiritual life. I intend to examine the visions of heaven in blues spirituals such as Blind Willie Johnson’s “Bye and Bye I’m Going to See the King,” and “Trouble Will Soon Be Over,” Charlie Patton’s “Lord I’m Discouraged,” Blind Gary Davis’s “The Angel’s Message to Me,” Blind Gary Davis’s “Twelve Gates in the City” and “Goin’ to Sit Down on the Banks of the River.”

Bio Małgorzata Ziółek-Sowioska graduated from the Institute of Art, Music Department at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin; from the American Studies Center in the Institute of Americas and Europe at the University of Warsaw and from the Institute of English Studies, in the Modern Language Department of Warsaw University. In 2011 she earned her Ph.D. degree from the Modern Languages Department, University of Warsaw for her dissertation Apocalyptic Themes and Tropes in African American Spirituals and the Blues. Since 2013 she has been teaching at the American Studies Center, Warsaw University.

Juan-José Martín-González: (Universidad de Málaga, Spain) “Transatlantic (Neo-)Victorianism and the African Diaspora in Nora Hague's Letters from an Age of Reason (2001).”

Abstract John M. Picker has recently pointed out that transatlantic studies, albeit very often focused on the mid-nineteenth century, generally lack any involvement in Victorian studies (Picker 2011: 595). Notwithstanding that this is symptomatic of the counter- nationalistic drive which characterizes maritime perspectives on history, culture and literature, a growing body of scholarship is tackling the intersections between transatlanticism and Victorianism. This paper seeks to contribute to those intersections by providing a reading of Nora Hague's neo-Victorian novel Letters from an Age of Reason (2001). Drawing on Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic (1993) and other works in maritime criticism, I aim at scrutinizing, via an analysis of Nora Hague's neo-Victorian narration, the delineations of the African diaspora in the Anglo-American oceanic world and their impact on Victorian culture. Ultimately, I argue that the (neo)Victorian Atlantic emerges as a unifying and multi- cultural medium in tune with a memory of the Victorian Empire shared between Britain, Africa and the Americas that contributes to the postcolonial project of decoupling Englishness and Whiteness in the cultural imaginary

Bio Juan-José Martín-González holds a BA in English Philology (2009) and a MA in English Studies (2011) from the University of Málaga. He is currently a PhD student (under the supervision of Professor Rosario Arias), predoctoral research fellow at the University de Málaga and member of VINS Network (https://vinsnetwork.org/). His research interests include Victorian studies, neo-Victorian studies, and Postcolonial fiction. He has recently published the article “'I Have Every Reason to Love England': Dark (Neo) Victorianism and Transatlantic Radicalism in Belinda Starling's The Journal of Dora Damage (2007)” (Nordic Journal of English Studies 15:4, 2016).

PANEL 25 The Radical Literary Tradition in the works of Toni Morrison. Carmen Laguarta Bueno (University of Zaragoza, Spain) Chair

Carmen Laguarta Bueno: (University of Zaragoza, Spain) “Toni Morrison’s Home from the Individual to the Collective from the Past to the Present.” Abstract Toni Morrison’s 2012 novel Home tells the story of Frank Money, an African-American veteran of the Korean War who, after being discharged from an integrated army, returns to the US and finds a still segregated country. In this short but beautifully written novel, Morrison manages to show that, although the 1950s are often thought of as a period of happiness and economic prosperity, it was also a difficult time for the members of some minority groups, such as African Americans. Frank Money’s journey south to rescue his sister Cee—who has been the victim of some eugenic experiments—becomes the perfect scenario to show all the violence and discrimination to which the members of this community were subjected during this period. Although some critics have laid the emphasis on Frank’s psychological trauma—the trauma resulting from the war—, in this paper I suggest that taking into account the social and historical contexts is essential to reach a better understanding of the novel. As I will try to demonstrate, Frank’s psychological trauma could be a consequence of the persisting discrimination that he, as an African American living in the Jim Crow Era, has suffered throughout his life, which ultimately points at the fact that the individual and the collective traumas of the members of this minority community should not be considered in isolation. Finally, in view of the clear parallels that can be drawn between some of the situations portrayed in the novel and some events that have recently occurred in the USA, I will argue that Morrison’s main aim when rewriting the past could be to denounce the present situation and to make readers aware of the need to continue to make progress towards equality.

Bio Carmen Laguarta is a research fellow at the Department of English and German Philology of the University of Zaragoza, a position she secured in October 2016, after being granted a national competitive research fellowship (FPU) financed by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport. Carmen graduated in English Studies at the University of Zaragoza in June 2015. In September 2016 she obtained the Master’s Degree in Advanced Studies on Literature and Cinema in English, after defending her MA thesis entitled “In what direction did lost men veer?”: An Analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road from the Perspectives of Trauma Studies and Camus’ Existentialism.

Carline Blanc: (Université Paris-Est, France) “Direction and Indirection: Finding the Relevant Tales in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.” Abstract The narrative of Toni Morrison's third novel, Song of Solomon, is infused with mythical structures and magical beliefs, so much so that it can eventually be read as a quest for identity through the encounter, understanding and revision of folklore.

The paper will focus on the use of folktales in the novel, functioning as landmarks in the hero’s development. Many tales of European origin are mentioned in the text and used as explanatory structures by various characters, but those parallels turn out to be ill informed, twisted and awry. Through her hero’s various deceptive experiences of Western folklore, Morrison questions the universality of the folktale and the cultural relevance of European motifs in a post-colonial context. Indeed the European tales in the novel function as shams, misleading patterns, because they are bereft of communal significance ; they are an exogenous—hence limiting—frame, in spite of the apparent obviousness of the parallels.

But, far from rejecting the central role of myth and folktale in subject definition, Morrison promotes an alternative through the African-American legend of the flying African, which leads the way to a better understanding of her hero’s true self and origins. In contrast with the fixity that accompanies the European tales in the novel, the author allows the readers to appreciate orality at work, through this legend by leading them through various versions of the same mythical narration which evolves as it is re-told. In this respect, the performance-centered approach of folklore will be used as the operative one in this paper.

Morrison accomplishes a subtle reflection on displacement through her use of fairy tales: re- and mis-located, approached from different angles, they are also the trigger of displacement for the central character, who constructs a material aim to his quest and misses the true, personal and spiritual one. Song of Solomon not only functions as a rewriting of European tales and their interpretation ; it is also a novel-long rewriting of the African-American tale, which allows the reader to gain a new understanding of the half-misleading title. Henry Louis Gates’s study of Signifyin’ as a central trope of African-American vernacular culture will be used to understand the strategies of displacement and indirection at work in those rewritings. I will argue that Morrison, by « signifyin’ » on tales of various origins, supports an active and creative appropriation of the folktale, both thematically and structurally. Bio Carline Blanc is a Ph.D. candidate at Université Paris-Est. Her research, supervised by Prof. Jean-Paul Rocchi, focuses on the use of folklore in the works of Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Huston, in relation to perfomance, gender and identity construction.

PANEL 27 Of Myths, Margins and Other Literary Devices Page Laws (Norfolk State University, Virginia, USA) Chair Page Laws: (Norfolk State University, Virginia, USA) “The New ‘America Novels’: Anglophone Fiction of the Current African Diaspora” Abstract The subgenre of the America Novel (generally a narrative about a new immigrant’s experience of the US) is a venerable topic for comparatists. Despite the fact Franz Kafka never set foot in the US, his novel Amerika (1927) may be the best known and most celebrated single work of the subgenre, but there are dozens more from the 20th century alone. In fact, I survived graduate study in the heavily theoretical 1970s Yale Comp Lit department by sidestepping frighteningly obscure (to me) theoretical dissertation topics and instead choosing recent 20th century America novels – on which to do my research. The result was a tame (but safe!) critique done in a fairly traditional (even New Critical) fashion of two French (Michel Butor’s Mobile, 1962, and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Projet pour une Révolution à New York, 1970) and two German novels (Peter Handke’s Der Kurze Brief zum Langen Abschied , 1972) and Uwe Johnson’s Jahrestage, 1970 ff.) written about America. I could work with all texts in their original familiar (=learned in high school) languages, and I threw in a smidgeon of structuralism and post-structuralism for theoretical cachet. But the discipline of Comparative Literature was shifting beneath me and would never be so safe, nor so Western European, again. Today’s most prominent America novels are by African writers who have either visited or emigrated to the US, but have maintained, actually and/or spiritually, dual citizenship between their disparate African homelands and America. They are global citizens of the new African Diaspora and rising stars of world Anglophone literature. This presentation sets four best-selling 21st century America Novels by contemporary African authors in context with the older French and German works mentioned above to explore the commonalities and differences in European and African immigrants’ experiences of America. The African authors and novels in question are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (Nigerian, 2013); Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (Ghanaian, 2016); Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Ethiopian, 2007); and Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers (Cameroonian, 2016).

Bio

Page Laws is Professor of English and Dean of the Honors College at Norfolk State University in Virginia. Twice a Fulbright scholar (Germany, Austria), Laws is co-editor of the 2011 book Transculturality: Perceptions of the Immigrant Other in Virginia and North Rhine Westphalia (Cambridge Scholars). She has also written chapters for Ethnic and Racial Identities in the Media, eds. Eleftheria Arapoglou et al. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; From Black to Schwarz: Cultural Crossovers between African America and Germany, eds. Maria I. Diedrich et al. LIT Verlag, 2010; Aesthetic Practices and Politics in Media, Music, and Art --Performing Migration, eds. Dorothea Fischer-Hornung et al., Routledge, 2010. Laws reviews films for a variety of popular and on-line publications. Her review of Birth of a Nation appeared in the Fall 2016 issue of Cineaste. She received her B.A. from Wellesley College and her M. Phil and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale University.

Maria Rocío Cobo Piñero: (University of Cádiz, Spain) “ From Zimbawe to America: re-naming transnational invisibility” Abstract This paper analyzes NoViolet Bulawayo’s critically acclaimed debut novel We Need New Names (2014), exposing the invisibility of a group of African children, first in Zimbabwe and then in Detroit, or “Destroyedmichygen,” as Darling, the diasporic girl, names the city. Naming acquires a vital significance in the novel and empowers children at the margins of society. They are invisible while in Africa, where a visit from well-meaning white NGO workers affords a chance to witness the dehumanizing impact of charity: “The man starts taking pictures with his big camera . . . They don’t care that we are embarrassed by our dirt and torn clothing, that we would prefer they didn’t do it; they just take the pictures anyway, take and take. We don’t complain because we know that after the picture-taking comes the giving of gifts.” (52).

In the United States, or “My America,” as Darling designates the country where she migrates and works at underpaid and unqualified jobs, migrants are invisible. Visibility or the lack of it is relevant in diasporic studies because the lives of migrants are frequently lived in the margins of society as “shadow lives” (Kral 46). F. Kral underlines the fact that invisibility seems to have emerged as a common characteristic of our times, a paradoxical feature of a world where public exposure and media attention are narrowly focused on some geographical areas, at certain individuals and for a limited time span.

The representation of Zimbabwean diaspora to the United States through the eyes of a vulnerable teenager acquires deep implications and will be linked to other contemporary novels on African diasporic movements to the US, such as Chimamamda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) or Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013). In this case, Darling is one of the 3 million diasporic subjects that left Zimbabwe after its independence from the United Kingdom in 1980, paradoxically called “born free” (Austin 43). Thus, I will connect the historical context that prompted this diaspora, the present exploitation of the African country and the cultural representation of migrant gendered subjects in the US.

Bio Rocío Cobo Piñero holds a Ph.D. in English Studies (2014) from Universidad de Sevilla in co-tutorship with Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo (Brasil), where she spent a year doing research in transnational African American Studies with a predoctoral fellowship. She holds a M.A. in African American Studies from the University of Pennsylvania (USA, 2001) and a M.A. in Teaching Spanish as a Second Language, from the Universidad Pablo de Olavide (Spain, 2010). She has published in national and international journals on literature, music and film from a perspective that interconnects gender, race and migratory movements. One of her publications includes the book Sonidos de la diaspora. Blues y jazz en Toni Morrison, Alice Walker y Gayl Jones (2015). She is a researcher in "HUM488 Estudios Norteamericanos", "Escritoras y Escrituras" and at Centro de Estudios de las Migraciones (Universidad de Huelva/UNESCO Chair). She currently teaches US and British Literature and Cultural Studies at the English Department of Universidad de Cádiz.

Elizabeth Smith: (Liverpool Hope University, UK) “Alice Childress and The Black Arts Movement” Abstract By the 1960s Childress was an established playwright, secure in her leftist politics. However, in spite of producing two of her best known plays in this period, Childress is rarely mentioned in the context of the Black Arts Movement (BAM). In many respects her writing was consistent with the black aesthetic of BAM, reflecting many of the principles set out by Larry Neil in his influential 1968 paper. She acknowledged the failure of integration in her first play, Florence (1949), and made the case for black theatre in an unpublished 1951 paper “For a Negro Theatre”. But in 1963 Childress confounded some critics and friends when she wrote Wedding Band: a Love/Hate Story in Black and White, a play that problematized assumptions about inter-racial relations that divided both black and white opinion. In 1968 Childress continued her exploration of the racial self in Wine in the Wilderness, a play which, whilst it critiques aspects of BAM that Childress found disingenuous, is a wider analysis of the intersections of race, class and gender. Referencing Wedding Band and Wine in the Wilderness, this paper will explore why, in spite of the similarities between them, Childress is not associated with BAM. Her consistent privileging of the Black woman’s voice and rejection of the masculinist tradition set her work apart from a movement that was male led and centred on masculinity. Her emphasis on difference and discontinuities in accounts of the Black literary left between 1950 and 1970 put her at odds with the racial solidarity demanded by BAM. Whereas for BAM, deconstructing Euro-centric form and language was central to revolutionary practice, Childress manipulated traditional structures to carry her liberation message. Whilst Childress is often represented as a 1950s African American writer whose voice was lost amidst 1960s stridency, this paper makes the case that Childress was ahead, rather than behind, the times with a particular relevance for contemporary African American social justice movements such as #Sayhername, which seeks to put the experience of Black women at the centre of Black Lives Matter.

Bio Elizabeth Smith is a PhD student at Liverpool Hope University, UK, where she obtained an MA in Popular literature (with distinction). In 2016 she was awarded a Short Term Fellowship to carry out research at Emory University, Atlanta. In 1995 Elizabeth obtained an M. Ed. from the University of Liverpool. Research for her dissertation “Education and Aid: Women Trade Unionists in Namibia” involved several visits to work with the National Union of Namibian Workers. Prior to returning to study Elizabeth was a Senior Trade Union Official at the British Trades Union Congress for 20 years.

PANEL 28 New Critical Approaches to the “Nadir” and the Future of African American Studies Maria Giulia Fabi (University of Ferrara, Italy), Tess Chakkalakal (Bowdoin College, USA) Chairs Maria Giulia Fabi: (University of Ferrara, Italy) “Back to the New Jim Crow: The Insurgent Significance of Early African American Speculative Fiction.” Abstract An integral part of the diasporic Afrofuturist project to think beyond the boundaries of racialized inequalities, African American speculative fiction written during the “nadir” provides new insight into the representational and aesthetic complexity of pre-Harlem Renaissance African American writers, enabling new lines of intertextual investigation and offering privileged literary insight into insurgent agendas of intellectual, cultural, and political resistance to Jim Crow. In this paper I will focus on how pre-Harlem Renaissance speculative critiques of the “neo-slavery” of segregation confronted and de-familiarized a past of oppression in order to envision a post-Jim Crow future and plan meaningful actions for social change. I will foreground how, not unlike pre- Harlem Renaissance critical emphasis on the “survival of the spirit of slavery,” 21st- century uses of phrases like “New Jim Crow,” “New Nadir,” and “New Disfranchisement” indicate the political struggle to name the specificity of present forms of systematic racialized oppression in relation to those of the past. From this vantage point, early 20th-century works of speculative fiction by E. Hopkins, W.E.B. Du Bois, C. Chesnutt, or L. B. J. Horace represent important antecedents and reveal their relevance to our understanding of the future of African American studies.

Bio M. Giulia Fabi is associate professor of American literature at the University of Ferrara, Italy. She is the author of Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel (2001) and America nera (2002). She has co-edited Barbara Christian’s New Black Feminist Criticism (2007) and has published essays in numerous journals and volumes, including African American Review, The Henry James Review, Letterature d’America, American Literary Realism, Legacy, The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel (2004), Recovering Five Generations Hence (2013), Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs (2013), and Approaches to Teaching Nella Larsen (2016). She is the editor of the Penguin edition of W. W. Brown's Clotel (2004), of a forthcoming edition of S. E. Griggs’s Pointing the Way, and of a series of Italian translations of African American novels. She is completing a book on early African American speculative fiction

Shirley Moody-Turner: (Pennsylvania State University, USA) “Anna Julia Cooper, Black Internationalism, and the Transnational Circuits of Black Print Cultures in the Postbellum Era and Beyond.” Abstract Working from an understanding of texts as material objects whose circulation and value are deeply informed by the politics of race and gender, my talk takes the case of 19th/20th century black intellectual and activist, Anna Julia Cooper to tell a more nuanced story of African American involvement with book and print production. Specifically, considering Cooper’s place within, but also beyond the 1890s, which are often recognized as a high point in black women’s creative and intellectual productivity, my talk takes up Cooper’s transnational publishing practices and efforts to internationalize black intellectual thought. Motivated by the sexism and racism in what she termed the “American publishing industry,” Cooper turned to French scholar, Félix Klein, to publish her translation, Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne (1925), and her incisive history arguing for a dialectical relationship between the French and Haitian Revolutions, L'Attitude de la France à l’égard de l’esclavage pendant la Révolution (1925) [France’s Attitudes Toward Slavery During the Revolution]. Cooper’s work in translation and her transatlantic history of race and empire productively link global circuits of knowledge production, African American print cultures, and black internationalism, thus offering a significant opportunity to remap the social geographies of black print culture. They also allow us to see how, Cooper, who was very much a contributor to and product of the postbellum/Pre-Harlem era, continued to participate in and shape the intellectual and critical landscape well into the twentieth century.

Bio

Shirley Moody-Turner is an associate professor of English and African American Studies at Pennsylvania State University, where she specializes in African American literary and cultural studies. She is the author of Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation and co-editor of Contemporary African American Literature: The Living Canon. She recently signed on as editor of volume VII for the Cambridge University Press multi-volume series, African American Literature in Transition, focusing on the years 1900-1910. She has published and forthcoming articles and book chapters in African American Review, MELUS, MLA Approaches to Teaching Charles W. Chesnutt, A Companion to African American Literature, A Companion to American Literature, New Essays on the African American Novel, and Oxford Bibliographies Online. Her current project, Privately Printing: Anna Julia Cooper and the Gender Politics of Black Publishing, recovers and critically examines Anna Julia Cooper’s innovative engagements with publishing and print cultures.

Tess Chakkalakal: (Bowdoin College, USA) “Literary Friendship across the Color Line: Charles W. Chesnutt and Albion W. Tourgee” Abstract

Famously dubbed "the nadir" by historian Rayford W. Logan, the period between the end of Reconstruction and the end of World War I has traditionally been regarded as a less-than-remarkable transition between the great age of slave narratives and the Harlem Renaissance. During the past two decades, this negative literary critical evaluation has been challenged by an outpouring of scholarly works on the major authors of this period, as well as by archival research that has recovered lesser-known African American writers and genres. The workshop will explore the significance of these various approaches to "the nadir" and their impact on our understanding of the field of African American studies and of its future. Bio Tess Chakkalakal is Visiting Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M International University and Associate Professor of Africana Studies and English at Bowdoin College. She is the author of Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage and Freedom in Nineteenth- Century America (University of Illinois Press, 2011) and co-editor of Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs (University of Georgia Press, 2013). She is currently completing a literary biography of the African American writer, Charles Waddell Chesnutt.

Anna Pochmara, (University of Warsaw, Poland) “Slaves to the bottle’: Amelia E. Johnson’s and Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s Uses of Temperance Discourse.” Abstract “Slaves to the bottle”: Amelia E. Johnson’s and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Uses of Temperance Discourse My paper will analyze dialogical relations between Amelia E. Johnson’s novel Clarence and Corinne, or God’s Way (1890), an evangelical conversion narrative published by the American Baptist Publishing society, and The Uncalled (1898), the first novel of Paul Laurence Dunbar and his “spiritual autobiography” to use the words of Robert Bone (1965, 39). As both texts feature racially indeterminate protagonists, are set in small northern towns, and were published by African American writers within the space of less than a decade, they encourage a thorough intertextual reading. In my examination, I will focus on the function of racial ambiguity in the novels’ recastings of the canonical conversion narrative as well as of the drunkard story, a lesser known American narrative form that, as Elaine Frantz Parsons shows in Manhood Lost: Fallen Drunkards and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States (2003), was immensely popular and influential throughout the nineteenth century. Furthermore, largely because of its dominance and flexibility, the drunkard story was meaningfully loaded with political significance, especially as far as race and gender politics are concerned, which can be aptly illustrated with Johnson’s and Dunbar’s works.

Bio Anna Pochmara is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies, the University of Warsaw. She holds a double M.A. degree and a Ph.D. in American literature and culture. She received a Fulbright Junior Grant to do research for her doctoral project at Yale University under academic guidance of Professor Hazel V. Carby. Her Ph.D. dissertation manuscript was mentioned as the runner-up in up in the 2009 Rob Kroes Publication Award competition organized by the European Association for American Studies. She is the author of over twenty articles and reviews in the field of American studies and The Making of the New Negro: Black Authorship, Masculinity, and Sexuality (2011

PANEL 29 From Afropolitan to Afrofuture: Interrogatives of Home by 21st Century Black Writers. Sandra García Corte (University of Oviedo, Spain) Chair

Lonetta M. Oliver: (St. Louis Community College-Florissant Valley, USA) The Pieces I left Behind: Disabled Bodies and Fractured Identities in Junot Diaz’s Novels.” Abstract “They say it came first from Africa. . .” is the foreboding opening phrase of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Like his others, the second of Diaz’s novels presents multiple voices to craft a narrative of the often ill-fated lives of the characters. Through flashbacks, we learn the origins of Oscar and about his inevitable destruction because of the fuku, the curse that has haunted his family for generations. Oscar and his sister Lola are burdened by the physical and psychological weight of their family’s legacy. Oscar is overweight, lonely and unloved as he attempts to navigate the spaces between his mother’s controlling demeanor and American expectations of masculinity and race. Lola, who must bear the psychic scars left by her mother’s brutal beating while she was a young woman still living in the Dominican Republic, is also damaged and left with a splintered identity as she struggles with her femininity, race and faith. Even Lola’s body becomes the backdrop (and penance) for her mother’s youthful indiscretions, growing to “. . .almost six feet tall with no tetas at all and darker than your darkest grandma” (168). We learn that the fuku follows families across the diaspora, resulting in fractured identities and disabled bodies in those it touches. The novels debate the need to know one’s history and face it, despite where a person of African descent calls home, maintaining that this element is crucial to developing a self-possessed identity and making Diaz’s work a testament to the far-reaching impact of the African diaspora.

Bio Lonetta Oliver is an Associate Professor of English at St. Louis Community College's Florissant Valley campus, located in Ferguson, MO. She has taught composition, business & technical writing, and African American literature at Saint Louis University, Southwestern Illinois College, St. Charles Community College and STLCC for the past 16 years. Dr. Oliver currently serves as Coordinator of Professional Development for the Center for Teaching & Learning.

Sandra García Corte: (University of Oviedo, Spain) “The Centrality of the Concept of ‘Transnational Home’ in Two Recent non-Afropolitan Narratives.” Abstract The term ‘Afropolitan’ has been object of critical debate since Selasi’s publication of “Bye-Bye, Babar” in 2005. This concept, which is the combination of ‘African’ and ‘cosmopolitan’, attempts at defining the newest generation of afro-descendants who are scattered in different metropolis around the global North; Selasi rejects the oversimplification of afro-diasporic subjectivities in the 21st century. Nonetheless, this word has been widely dismissed by claiming that it reinforces stereotyped ideas of Africanity and points to commodification (Dabiri 2016; Tveit 2013). Adichie defends: “I’m not an Afropolitan. I’m African . . . Many Africans are happily African and don’t think they need a new term” (in Barber 2013). Although Selasi’s and Adichie’s points of view seem to collide, in 2013 both authors published novels which portray very similar topics. I consider that there is a crucial theme for the understanding of contemporary Afro-diasporic subjectivities which both narratives share: the portrayal of the concept of ‘transnational home’. This emerges as a consequence of current spatial reorganizations of peoples. The aim of this paper is exploring some shared experiences of the African diasporas through the analysis of the concept of ‘home’ in two recent migration narratives: Selasi’s Ghana Must Go and Adichie’s Americanah. As a point of departure, I will use Selasi’s rejection of the identification of ‘home’ with one’s country of origin in “Don’t Ask Where I’m From . . .” (2014); she opts for identifying it with one’s locality instead, i.e., one’s lived experiences, because people like her “belong to no single geography, but feel at home in many” (2005). In order to identify this locality, she proposes “the three ‘R’s test” to reflect on one’s own rituals, relationships and restrictions. Other critics like Blunt and Dowling (2006) also agree with Selasi in that home represents an emotional space.

Bio Sandra García Corte is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Oviedo, beneficiary of an FPU scholarship by the Spanish Ministry of Education and member of the research group Intersections. She holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English Studies and a Master’s Degree in Gender and Diversity. Her MA thesis deals with Afropolitanism and spatial textualities in Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go. Thanks to an Excellence scholarship by Mª Cristina Masaveu Foundation, she has specialized in decolonial and postcolonial theories in the “Decolonizing Knowledge and Power” Summer School. She is particularly interested in contemporary migration narratives written by women of African descent.

Georges Faye : ( Université Paris-Est). “Deconstruction or Reconstruction of racial identities in postcolonial women immigrant literature: A cross-cultural reading of Fatou Diome and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.” Abstract Born respectively in Sénégal and in Nigeria, Fatou Diome and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie can be said to be postcolonial writers who deal with immigration from a personal experience. Actually, Diome left her homeland to settle in France after her marriage with a Frenchman and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie travelled to America to further her studies. This experience of exile is well reflected in their writings. Their novels, in general, are analyzed as problematizing the immigration of the Black female subject who running from a patriarchal motherland discovers how racist practices are not only widespread but somehow normalized in the host country. Thus, this communication intends to study the treatment of race in their literary creation. Its main aim is to focus on the reception of the Black intellectual heritage by these authors and to show how, according to different cultural milieu – Diome’s Francophone perspective and Chimamanda’s Anglophone one here – various strategies of re-appropriation are elaborated. For this purpose, on the first hand, this paper will highlight theoretical points of intersection that is to say where their theories meet the one of the most prominent Black thinkers such as William Du bois, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Leopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon… And on the other hand, it will show how, in return, they deconstruct these theories to reconstruct new ones and enrich the debate on the question of what does it mean to be a Black woman? Using a transdisciplinary approach to interrogate these literary productions, I will often resort to the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida to confront Chimamanda and Diome’s texts with contemporary race theoreticians’ works such as the one of Lewis Gordon, Achille Mbembé, and Linda Alcoff. This confrontation will allow me to illustrate that, in the framework of race studies; literature plays an important role, and without it the comprehension of racial issues will always remain incomplete and to a certain extent irrelevant.

Bio Ph.D candidate at Université Paris

10:30-10:45 a.m. COFFEE BREAK

10:45-12:45 PLENARY ROUND TABLE SESSION “The State of Black Studies in Europe”

Moderator: Professor Claire Oberon-García (Colorado College, USA)

Participants: Justine Tally (University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Canary Islands) Kwame Nimako (Director Summer School on Black Europe, The Netherlands) Kehinde Andrews (Birmingham City University) Ewa Luczack (Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland)

12:45-2:15 p.m. PARALLEL SESSIONS

PANELS 30-32, 34-35

PANEL 30 “I am who I say I am:” Agency and Paradox in Black Transnational Identities & the Quest for Home. Patricia Williams Lessane (College of Charlestown, SC USA) Chair

Patricia Williams Lessane: (College of Charlestown, SC USA) “No Sanctuary in Charleston: Race, Religion, and Cultural Memory in the Holy City.” Abstract In my June 19, 2015 New York Times op-ed entitled, “No Sanctuary in Charleston,” I reflect upon the tragic killing of nine of my fellow Charlestonians, one of them— Cynthia Hurd-- a dear friend and colleague. The sentiments of the piece underscore not only the shock and violent realities that Black people continue to face nationally, but also the precariousness of Blackness—Black identity, Black spaces, Black history and Black narratives at work in historic Charleston. The Holy City is beautiful and beguiling at the same time. Billowing Spanish moss, the sweet smell of magnolia blossoms, the roving inlets, towering, palmetto trees, and the lush marshland enchant the soul and inspire the mind. Everywhere I look, I am reminded of the beautiful cinematography of Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust and the people and scenes immortalized in the paintings of Gullah artist Jonathan Green. The Gullah dialect is still spoken in private and public spaces—grocery store cashiers will often ask Au una dui ,church choirs and funeral attendees can often be heard singing the Gullah hymn, “You better answer to Your Name,” and Gullah infused delicacies—including red rice and shrimp and grits- are commonplace in most, if not, all of Charleston’s finest restaurants. Black and White Charlestonians alike, greet one another on the street; youth readily address their elders as “ma’am” and “sir,” and horse-drawn carriages transport predominately White tourists throughout the historic district, a garish throwback ( for some ) to antebellum days. Recently, Condé Nast named Charleston, number one tourist destination in the US for the third straight year, making this genteel bastion of historic preservation the “go to” vacation spot for foodies, lay genealogists and history buffs alike. Yet, there is more than meets the eye at work in Charleston. Incidents like the murders of the Charleston Emanuel 9 and the shooting of Walter Scott—an unarmed Black man at the hands of a North Charleston police officer—signal what Black people in Charleston already know: that there is trouble in Charleston and this is nothing new. The former seat of the Confederacy, Charleston prides itself on polite southern sensibilities and a legacy of relatively calm race relations for a city whose long-time Black majority continue to be marginalized at lightening speed. No Sanctuary in Charleston: Race, Religion, and Cultural Memory in the Holy City will examine the contemporary Black Charleston experience from an interdisciplinary approach. As an anthropologist, I am most interested in the customs, rituals, and real- life experiences of the drylongso4 and their connection to lowcountry history and geography. As a “cum’yah” living in Charleston, South Carolina and working with the local Gullah communities of Mount Pleasant, James Island, and John’s Island, I am enveloped by Gullah sea island culture and sensitive to the political, historical, “racial”, and socio-economic factors impacting Black Charlestonian on a daily basis.

4 Gullah term for the every day man and woman. This project draws from current local and national coverage of tragic incidents such as the killings of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Mike Brown, Sandra Bland, Terrence Crutcher in Tulsa, and most recently Keith Lamont Scott, who was killed in Charlotte, but who had roots here In Charleston, as well as the burgeoning groundswell of local support for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the Charleston Area Justice Ministry (CAJM) and utilize the Avery archives, to situate my commentary on Black life in Charleston. This project draws upon the work of noted scholars such as Bernard Powers, Steve Estes, Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, and Katherine Mellen Charron to provide the historical context on which to situate my examination of Charleston’s unique race relations.

Bio Dr. Williams Lessane is the Executive Director of The College of Charleston’s Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture where she is a tenured faculty member in the library. In 2010, she joined The College of Charleston as the Executive Director of the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, where she is an affiliated faculty member in Sociology and Anthropology and African American Studies.

Dr. Williams Lessane is currently co-editing two volumes of work: We Carry These Memories Inside of We: Celebrating Daughters of the Dust and the Blacks Arts Aesthetic of Julie Dash under contract with University of South Carolina Press and Dreams Deferred, Promises and Struggles; Perceptions and Interrogations of Empire, Nation, and Society, under contract with Liverpool University Press.

Karen Kossie-Chernyshev: (University of Houston, Texas)

“Prophetic Journeys Delayed and Fulfilled: Reclaiming the Overlooked- African-and American-Centered Migrations Novels of Lilliam Jones Horace (1880-1965).

Abstract

This paper will draw heavily on my published and ongoing research projects on Lillian Jones Horace. Recovering Five Generations Hence: The Life and Writing of Lillian Jones Horace (Texas A & M University Press, 2013) examines Horace’s historic first novel, which explores migration to Africa as a gateway to self-actualization. European scholar M. Guilia Fabi, University of Ferrara, Italy, was among the contributors to this collection. My recently published edited work Angie Brown: A Jim Crow Romance (Outskirts Press, 2017) examines Angie Brown (1949), which treats migration to the American Midwest as a possible avenue to financial success and personal fulfillment. My research on Horace also inspired me to found SWATH (Summer Workshop on African American Texas History), an interdisciplinary workshop for K-16 teachers. SWATH has convened for three consecutive years thanks to support from the Summerlee Foundation and other partners. SWATH welcomes participants to gain an in-depth, prismatic understanding of African American Texas history—a rich narrative that truly encompasses the globe, especially Spain, where CAAR convenes this year.

In short, given the purview of my research and community projects, I would greatly appreciate the opportunity to share what I have learned through my extensive, fourteen-year examination of Lillian Jones Horace’s life and works.

Bio Karen Kossie-Chernyshev, PhD, Professor of History. Founding Director, Summer Workshop on African American Texas History (SWATH) Department of History & Geography,Houston, TX

Vanessa Gonlin: (Texas A&M University, USA) “Racial Identity Mismatch and Racial Discrimination in Texas: Blacks, Latinx and Whites” Abstract Interactions between races and ethnicities are at the center of diasporic encounters. In Texas, these encounters are often seen simplistically as between Whites and Mexicans and Mexican Americans. But realities are far more complicated. Not only do the interactions involve diverse groups of Whites and Mexicans and Mexican Americans, in the mix are also variegated groups of Blacks, both native and foreign-born. Texas, one of the most rapidly demographically changing states in America, thus, is a racialized site that affects perceptions of race and the ways in which racial discrimination is formulated and articulated.

My presentation will focus on racial identity mismatch in Texas among Whites, Latinx and Blacks and how this mismatch is connected to discrimination. Using the 2015 Texas Diversity Survey (TDS), I will describe and analyze how imposed racial identifications collide with and sometimes override self-identifications. My analysis will demonstrate how group identifications, racial discrimination and its consequences continue to evolve in complicated ways that underscore transformations of the twenty first century.

Bio

Vanessa Gonlin is a doctoral student and Diversity Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Texas A&M University. Gonlin serves as a research assistant in the Department of Sociology analyzing patterns regarding multiracial identity, interracial relationships, and skin tone. Gonlin's further research interests include identity formation, intersectionality, and immigration. Gonlin is actively working to create a safe space for first generation students on campus, a project in which she is collaborating with undergraduate students, graduate students, campus leaders, and administrators. Gonlin is committed to her research on race and to being a resource within academia.

PANEL 31 Encountering Diasporas Excavating and Assessing Black Women’s Multiple Identities. María Frías Rudolphi (Universidad de Da Coruña, Spain) Chair Trudier Harris: (University of Alabama, USA) “Meditations on Horror, History, Black Lives and Literature” Abstract It is not simply vampires, zombies, and werewolves. They certainly qualify, but they are not the whole story. Nor is it just a matter of revenants who pop up at unexpected times to frighten some unsuspecting person into spasms. And body snatchers such as Doro in several of Octavia E. Butler’s novels do not command the entire narrative either. Horror and the horrible in African American life and culture have been focused less on the extra-natural, supernatural, and otherworldly than upon the things of this world that have led to maiming, transformation, altered psyches, and often death. An exploration of what horror has meant in African American life and culture throughout black existence in the new world entails a constant re-assessment and re-evaluation of that operative word. This paper will focus on that re-examination and re-definition by using several African American writers as points of focus, including Butler, Jewelle Gomez, Tayari Jones, and Alice Walker. However, this discussion is equally informed by history, folklore, popular culture, and cultural memory. This paper will argue that, in the context of African American literature, history, life, and culture, horror must be tamed, that is, transformed from its extra-natural connotations to incorporate it into useful, real-life situations.

Bio Trudier Harris Department of English The University of Alabama Tuscaloosa

Sirpa Salenius: (University of Eastern, Finland) “Sarah Parker Remond Reassessing Black Womanhood.”

Abstract African Americans, both men and women, struggle in today’s United States with the problem of defining their identities in positive terms. The violence, brutality, and oppression that dominate their past (and present) complicate the conceptualization of empowering African American selfhood. This paper, based on archival research, recovers one such example from oblivion, focusing on the powerful nineteenth- century articulation of black womanhood by Sarah Parker Remond. Sarah Remond, an African American abolitionist, was born free in Salem (Massachusetts) in 1826. Although in many respects her life resembled that of white middle-class Americans – she was born into a rather prosperous family of entrepreneurs, she was educated and socially active – she was black, and, as Hazel V. Carby notes, womanhood “was denied the black woman.” In 1856, Remond started her career in the United States as an antislavery lecturer, touring with Abby Kelley Foster and Susan B. Anthony. She defied conventionality when she ascended on the platform, speaking in front of large audiences to raise awareness of the condition of slaves and to promote women’s emancipation. As a public lecturer, Remond subverted racial and gender ideologies, becoming an empowering example of black leadership. She subsequently traveled to England, where she continued her abolitionist activities, becoming one of the central figures in British activism. From London she moved to Florence, Italy, where she graduated from one of the most prestigious medical schools of Europe, the Santa Maria Nuova hospital school. Hence, she provided a new model of black womanhood by reassessing her identity as an educated, intellectual, and professional woman living and working in cosmopolitan Europe.

Bio Sirpa Salenius is a senior lecturer at the University of Eastern Finland. She has taught British and American literature and Academic writing at American university programs in Rome and Florence (Italy) and at the University of Tokyo (Japan). Her forthcoming publications include An Abolitionist Abroad: Sarah Parker Remond in Cosmopolitan Europe (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016).

Renée M. Baron: (The Juilliard School, NY, USA) “Dismantling the Workings of Erasure: Lynn Nottage and the Visualization of Diaspora.” Abstract Second only to her concern with the experience of Black women and “rescuing” their voices from history, playwright Lynn Nottage is preoccupied with issues concerning representation and how they play out in the experiences of Black women in the diaspora. In each of her plays, she engages the manner in which the medium of representation contemporaneous to the plot’s settings manifests in the depiction of a particular iteration of Black female identity within the historical moment. The means of representation and its outcome are inextricably linked, and it is the exploration of the relationship between them that is Nottage’s way of revealing and dismantling the workings of erasure. For example, in Las Meninas, a play set in the French court of Louis XIV, painting is the medium situated at the intersection of the action. The painter, clearly based on the 17th century painter Diego Velasquez, reveals the power dynamics involved in depicting court life and, by extension, their implications for Louise Marie-Thérèse, the rumored Black child of Queen Marie-Thérèse. In Intimate Apparel, set in early twentieth century New York, the plot revolves around two sepia-toned photographs that reflect the stark difference between the image and the reality of seamstress Esther Mill’s life before and after her marriage to Barbadian-born, Panama Canal worker George Armstrong. In Crumbs from the Table of Joy, and By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, both set primarily in the mid-twentieth century, film and filmmaking reveal the possibilities and limitations of Black female aspiration. Finally, in Nottage’s most recent play Sweat, set in the 1980s, features television as it morphs into the cable- based, non-stop entity that it is today. In some ways, it is the noisy soundtrack to the tale of the messy race relations at the core of the play. Taken per se, Nottage’s attention to the details of visual media might appear merely to signal good craftsmanship for they render the settings of her play authentic. Taken as a strategy within her oeuvre however, this attention exposes the underpinnings of Black female erasure from the Western canon of experience and allows Nottage to insert Black female experience into it.

Bio Renée M. Baron, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Liberal Arts and American Studies The Juilliard School

María Frías Rudolphi: (Universidad da Coruña, Spain) “Emigrant Women’s Bodies in Transit from Africa to Spain in Film.”

Abstract Spanish maritime border with our neighbouring continent, Africa, is about 14 kilometers long. On a clear day, one can see the north of the African coast at an apparently short distance from the South of Spain, let us say from Málaga or Tarifa. If you need to travel to Morocco whether for business or a vacation, the high speed ferry boats will take you from Algeciras (Cádiz, Spain) to Tangier (Morocco, Africa) in about 35 minutes. If you are not in a rush or are travelling on a low budget, the crossing might take as long as ninety minutes. And that works both ways. However, for thousands of Africans who are looking for a better life somewhere—anywhere—in Europe (or elsewhere), those fourteen kilometers are a liquid but solid, dangerous, and lethal border. If they are lucky, the crossing will take hours or even days. But, statistically, only a small percentage of women, children, and men make it. As diasporic subjects, once they reach Spanish soil, their journey has only started because they will find unsurmountable obstacles ahead of them.

The purpose of this paper is to look at Gerardo Olivares’s film 14 kilometros (2007), and their three main African emigrants (Buba, Violet, and Mukela), and to focus on the female character, Violet, to analyze the reasons why she leaves home. In the company of Buba, Violet, and Mukela, the spectators travel with them through Mali, Niger, Argel, and Morocco—the longest and most dangerous route—and, in the process, they/we not only learn about these emigrants’s dreams and frustrations but also about the corrupt and illegal political and social practices.

My aim is to prove that those women’s bodies who are in transit from Africa to Spain, as Violet is, are particularly vulnerable, painfully too, in their sexuality both at home and abroad. Since I do volunter work for the local prison, I would like to give voice to those African and/or African American women who might mirror Violet’s struggle to keep on walking, always in transit, both in mind and body.

Bio

María Frías is a former teacher at Duke University (US), and Alcalá University (Madrid), a Visiting Scholar at the University of Ghana, and a Fellow at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Her work has appeared in Callaloo, Wasafiri, Transition, and elsewhere. She is currently Assistant Professor at the University of A Coruña (Spain) where she teaches courses in African American Literature, and the Literatures of the African Diaspora. Together with other colleagues, she brings her primary research interest to the center of the Spanish academic syllabus--with an emphasis on black women's fiction, black women's gender theories and cultural studies. She works as a vounteer for the University NGO, and offers a weekly work-shop on film and multi-ethnic cultures at the local state prison.

PANEL 32 Global Impetus and Implications in Black Transatlantic Narratives. Gundolf Graml (Agnes Scott College, GA, USA) Chair

Bettina Hofmann: (University Wuppertal, Germany) “Brown kids Dreaming: Jacqueline Woodson and James Baldwin.” Abstract The second entry to Webster’s online Dictionary defines “diaspora” as “the movement, migration, or scattering of a people away from an established or ancestral homeland.“ The ensuing feelings of alienation when having to adapt to a new environment but also the strategies that are then developed to cope with the new situation are reflected in imaginative literature. The novel of initiation is especially interesting in this respect for here the slowly developing awareness of contradictions in adult society and the need to secure one’s place therein coincide in this genre. I shall look at two texts, namely James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and Jacqueline Woodson, brown girl dreaming (2014). Both are autobiographically informed, about a black boy growing up in Harlem in the 1930s, respectively a black girl in South Carolina in the 1960s. Even though the families’ journeys head into opposite directions, both protagonists find themselves in diasporic situations, uprooted in new social and economic surroundings with which they need to cope. In my talk I shall explore how the two writers represent their protagonists’ subjectivities that are in transit. I shall discuss if finally a sense of arrival/of closure and thus a sense of having reached some kind of home is achieved.

Toniesha Taylor: (Prairie View A&M University, TX, USA) Blackness throughout the Diaspora.” Abstract Throughout the African Diaspora, there are media images of Black people engaged in social justice. Often presented as in solitary with one another, Black Lives Matter movement and Movement for Black Lives, these images present a shared cultural frame based on the idea that both Blackness and white supremacy are uniformly presented and performed throughout the diaspora. This essay argues that the nature of the media, particularly social media sites like Twitter allow for both a singularity and nuance in the ways in which individuals and groups engage in activism in Black Lives Matter movement and Movement for Black Lives. Microblogging provides a unique opportunity to analysis the micro theorizing occurring on the ground throughout the diaspora by those engaged, however tangentially, in the social justice movements known as Black Lives Matter movement and Movement for Black Lives. In these micro theorizing moments individuals and groups push back on traditional media and its attempts to create universal or singular images. This project centralizes these images using a large mix media corpora of over 200,000 tweets, GIFs, videos and memes to analyze the global engagement of individuals around the diaspora. Ultimately this essay hopes to illuminate the frames of diasporic social justice as grounded discourse with the application of critical race theory and digital humanities methods.

Bio Toniesha L. Taylor, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Communication Department of Languages and Communication Prairie View A & M University

Gundolf Graml: (Agnes Scott College, GA, USA) “’What had not happened in Chicago would finally happen in Berlin:’ Racial and Sexual Re-Mappings of Berlin in Darryl Pinckney’s Black Deutschland (2016).” Abstract Jed, the recovering alcoholic and gay African-American from Chicago’s South Side who doubles as personal narrator of Black Deutschland takes the reader back to late 1980s Berlin, the divided city shaped by the iconic Wall. From the beginning Pinckney’s main protagonist stylizes his life in Berlin on prior literary explorers of this city. “Berlin meant boys, Isherwood said” – the third sentence of Pinckney’s novel invokes Christopher Isherwood’s literary and sexual exploits of Weimar-era Berlin. Throughout the novel, Isherwood provides the literary templates for Jed’s ruminations about his sexual desires: “Berlin meant white boys *…+” (3). With regard to his racial identity, Jed also tries to infuse his own journey as a black man from Chicago to Berlin with meaning by referencing the European travels and exile experiences of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Claude McKay.

Within this web of intertextual references, Jed embraces Berlin as the European city par excellence, as the opposite of Chicago and as the “somewhere else I yearned for” (12). Berlin prompts Jed to comment self-ironically on his flaneurism in the context of race: “I always loved the sound of my footsteps in Berlin. The Negro in Europe” (25). At the same time, privileged by his American passport he is able to cross the wall into East Berlin, where he “found the usual racial situation reversed. These white people who spoke low like inhabitants of a ghost town were the primitives, the needy tribesmen I couldn’t take back with me” (27).

In my paper I will discuss Pinckney’s Black Deutschland as an example of African- American diasporic writing that revisits the Transatlantic cultural connections between African-American and German culture. Specifically, I will analyze the novel as a black remapping of West and East Berlin in the context of globalization and consumerism. The main protagonist’s self-conscious references to other black writers’ experiences of Berlin, but especially his self-stylization as black flaneur in a “white” city highlight and also criticize the implicit whiteness of traditional theorizations of European modernist subject formation. Furthermore, Jed’s exploration of Berlin and its Holocaust-related culture of atonement also enable a discussion of Berlin as fictional counter image of 1980s Chicago and a critical look at the more or less complete silencing of the historic trauma of slavery in dominant US public discourses Bio Dr. Gundolf Graml Associate Professor, Director of German Studies Agnes Scott College

PANEL 34 Music in Diasporic Encounters Inecke Bockting . (Catholic University of Paris, France) Chair

Ulrich Adelt: (University of Wyoming, USA) “From Germany to the ‘Hoods of New York City: Kraftwerk in the Context of African American Music.” Abstract German electronic group Kraftwerk, founded in 1970 in Düsseldorf, deliberately moved away from African American and Anglo-American influences in their music in order to envision a post-war German identity. However, their all-electronic “German” music became increasingly popular among African Americans in places like New York City and Detroit, who reinterpreted tracks like “Autobahn” and “Trans Europe Express” in an urban black context. As Jam Master Jay of hip hop group Run DMC stated, “these guys proved to me you don’t have to be where I’m from to get the music. That beat came from Germany all the way to the ’hoods of New York City.” The popularity among black audiences in turn led Kraftwerk to incorporate musical elements from African American artists like James Brown and George Clinton for their albums Man Machine and Computer World. Afrika Bambaataa went on to further popularize Kraftwerk’s music in the electro-funk and hip hop communities. In my presentation, I will interrogate how these transnational flows of music represented racialized and national identities. I argue that Kraftwerk’s international success had been brought about by their focus on a specifically German identity informed by irony and stereotypes. The group set out to break with a German past that had become impossible to defend. This deterritorialized and ruptured national identity made it accessible in an Afrofuturist context, leading to the cross-pollination between Kraftwerk and African American funk and rap artists in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Bio Dr. Ulrich Adelt Associate Professor American Studies and African American and Diaspora Studies The University of Wyoming

Inecke Bockting: (Catholic University of Paris, France) “The In-between of Jazz and the Blues.” Abstract Seldom have I read such poetic words of praise as there are on the introductory pages of the novel Half-Blood Blues by the Ghanaian-born Canadian writer Esi Edugyan. As The Seattle Times puts it, “the story hurls us from Baltimore, to Berlin, to Paris, to an obscure Polish town—as breathlessly as that trumpet player finishing a long heartfelt riff. From bleak, violent cityscapes, it shifts to the troubled souls of the musicians as they tend the pure flame of art and the impure fire of jealousy.” The book, which won many prizes in Canada as well as in America and Europe, basically tells the story of a group of Jazz musicians at the time of the Second World War, presenting, to quote Newsday, “a bold imagining of a hitherto little-regarded corner of the black Diaspora. In this paper I will show how this imagining of the black Diaspora is a palimpsests of liminalities: temporal, spatial, racial and, most gloriously, musical. While the Blues, as a musical genre, represents an endeavor to overcome—or at least live with—racial injustice and grief, Jazz, in its own way, is an overcoming of the Blues. The symbolics of this transformation is important and can be seen, for instance, in Toni Morrison’s well- known novel Jazz. But in the context of a warridden Europe, the celebration that Jazz represents is returned towards the suffering of the Blues, the plot of the novel centering around the record that the musicians try to produce in Paris, in the in- between of the two musical styles, its title also the title of the novel: Half-Blood Blues. Bio Ineke Bockting holds doctoral degrees from the Universities of Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Montpellier, France (“Habilitation à diriger des recherches”). She has taught at Universities in The Netherlands, Norway and France, and she is now a full professor at the Catholic University of Paris, where she is Chair of the English Department and Director of the MASTER program “Textes, représentations et cultures anglophones," as well as Co-Director of the research group "Langues, Cultures, Histoire et Education." Her publications include works on various aspects of the American South, William Faulkner, ethnic literatures, travel-narrative, autobiography, narratology, literary stylistics and pragmatics, and cognitive science and literature. She is a member of the Unité de Recherche « Religion, Culture et Société » of the Catholic University of Paris.

PANEL 35 Haitian Independence and Diasporic Encounters Patrycja kurjatto.Chair Johanna F. Seibert: (University of Gutenberg, Mainz, Germany) “Ready for the Defence of What We Hold the Most Dear”: Mobilizing Haitian Independene in The Watchman and Jamaica Free Press (1829-1836).” Abstract Exploring the intersections between Haitian and African American histories, literatures, and cultures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, seminal essay collections like Maurice Jackson and Jacqueline Bacon’s African Americans and the Haitian Revolution (2010) and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Michael J. Drexler’s Haiti and the Early United States (2016) have enriched our perspective on the workings of what Paul Gilroy famously termed the Black Atlantic. Acknowledging that Haiti indeed constitutes a productive lens for studying early Black transnationalism, this paper sets out to contribute to the debate on Black print cultures of Haiti in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world by turning toward The Watchman and Jamaica Free Press (1829-1836), edited, printed, and published by two Black Jamaicans who were nominally free but de facto neither emancipated nor recognized as full citizens. In the issue from August 13, 1831, Robert Osborn and Edward Jordon reprinted prominently on the front page a proclamation from Haiti’s President John Peter Boyer, delivered at the National Palace and emphatically addressing the Haitian citizens. “Haytians!”, Boyer declares here 27 years after Haitian Independence, “to maintain peace it is requisite to always be ready for the defence of what we hold most dear – our liberty, our national identity! (2) The editors of the Watchman did, however, not merely reprint this impressive document of Black resistance against the French neocolonizers, but they equally dedicated an editorial in the same issue to the case of Haiti. I argue that those two printings, in addition to shedding light on the story of Haiti’s transition from a “world historical site of antislavery and anticolonial revolution” to “neocolonial debtor nation” to use Maddock Dillon and Daxler’s phrasing (13), embody a gesture of resistance on the side of the Black populations on islands like Jamaica, still enslaved and still under colonial rule. As an instance of Black transnationalism, the Watchman issue from August 1831 expresses solidarity with the neighbor island and, at the same time, particularizes the paper’s larger editorial agenda. Both Osborn and Jordon saw the political potential inherent in print cultures of Haiti – a discursive project in which the editors participated when mobilizing Haitian Independence in the struggle for personhood and against the sugar plantocracy on Jamaica as I will illustrate. This paper accordingly intends to show that almost three decades after Toussaint Louverture’s death and the Haitian Revolution John Peter Boyer and Haitian Independence inspired resistance against white supremacy among the Black diasporas in the Atlantic realm, in America but also in Jamaica. Bio JohannaF. Seibert. Ph.D. Candidate Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany

Raphaël Lambert: (Kansai University, Japan) “Edouard Glissant’s ‘Relation? And Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘Being-with’: Slave Trade, Community, and Globalization.” Abstract “The Open Boat,” the short poetic meditation that opens Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1990), offers both to remember and transcend the trauma of the middle passage by re-interpreting the hold of the slave ship as a womb wherefrom a new humanity has emerged. The survivors of the “nonworld” (the hold) are thrown into the “absolute unknown” of the New World, and this unknown has become knowledge—not a knowledge already framed in cultural certainties, and not a knowledge restricted to Glissant’s own Afro-Caribbean community. Glissant postulates an all-encompassing knowledge conducive to what he defines as Relation. Relation, which started in the “nonworld,” has grown into something new that Glissant calls “total world.” The “total world” refutes the predictable, the definitive, and everything that opposes communication and heterogeneity. It is a quest to reveal the world in all its diversity. Through the concept of Relation, Glissant not only questions racial and cultural essentialism, but also reappraises the notion of community in ways that resonate with Jean-Luc Nancy’s own reworking of the same notion through the central concept of “being-with.” In The Inoperative Community (1986), Nancy does not so much redefine as “unwork” the notion of community with the hope to thwart the longing for immanence that typifies Western societies. Immanentism, Nancy argues, stems from a nostalgia for an idealized, harmonious and unified lost community—a nostalgia that has resulted in the totalitarian experiments of the twentieth century (Nazism and Soviet Communism). Nancy’s concept of immanentism, as the first part of this talk will demonstrate, bears a striking resemblance to Glissant’s concept of filiation, the myth of creation on which European cultures have built their dual view of the world and justified their subjugation of cultures deemed inferior. Both Nancy and Glissant believe that a better humanity can be achieved through a better understanding of what community really entails, and both have imagined an alternative model of community. In this perspective, the second part of this talk will explore the analogy between Glissant’s concept of Relation and Nancy’s concept of “being-with” as both approaches make each and every singularity, in all its complexity and plurality, the center of community. In fact, Nancy’s central notion that there is no being without being-with, no existence without co-existence, finds a concrete illustration in Glissant's description of the lone, bewildered captive in the hold of the slave ship. And just like Glissant’s theory of Relation does not remain stuck in a historical and postcolonial discourse, Nancy’s concept of “being-with” is much more than a mere, abstruse reworking of Heidegger’s “Mitsein.” As the final part of this talk will show, both Glissant and Nancy, through their respective notions of “mondialité” (worldliness) and “mondialisation” (globalization) envision a concrete application of their theories in today’s world. Indeed, while acutely aware of the harmful effects of a globalized free-market economy, both Glissant and Nancy see the ever-increasing movements of populations and explosion of cultural exchanges as fertile ground for the reinvention of community, and the advent of a world that discourages identitarian closure and makes room for all singularities. As Glissant claims at the end of “The Open Boat”: “Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.”

Bio PhD.English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, United States, May 2001 Raphaël Lambert (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) is Professor of African American literature and culture in the department of British and American Cultural Studies at Kansai University in Osaka, Japan. His current research focuses on the transatlantic slave trade with an emphasis on the notion of community; his essay, “Roots: Black Story, White Ideology?” is forthcoming in Transition 122 / Special Issue: Reconsidering Roots.

14:15-15:15 p.m. LUNCH AT THE LAW FACULTY

15:15-16:45 p.m PARALLEL SESSIONS

PANELS 36-39

PANEL 36 The Complexities of African Diaspora Experience Joyce A. Joyce (Temple University, USA) Chair

Kwakiutl Dreher: (University of Nebraska Lincoln, USA) “Longing for Home: Olaudah Equiano and Resistance to the Influence of Intercultural Contact.” Abstract In his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, the author recounts his “migratory circulations” experiences after being kidnapped from his Igbo home in Africa. From Greenland, to the Mosquito Coast (Nicaragua present day), across the pond to Virginia in the United States, then to Genoa and Istanbul, among other locals, Equiano, the “Accidental Tourist” as he is called by Geraldine Murphy, recounts the negotiations he has to make as a kidnapped African who survives the middle passage and, no matter the success, still longs for his homeland. This essay will explore the ways in which The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano produces a transcultural and transnational narrative that makes known the intersections of identity and race, and how these intersections are complicated in the culture of enslavement and, ultimately, freedom as Equiano lands in myriad geographical regions. The questions entertained are: Who is the Olaudah Equiano that emerges after his intercultural contact and interactions with myriad people and spaces/places? How does his longing for his African homeland inform his negotiary practices?

Bio

Dr. Kwakiutl L. Dreher Associate Professor English and Ethnic Studies University of Nebraska Lincoln

Christopher Smith: (University of Toronto, Canada) “Contingent Emplacements: Black Queer Diaspora (s) and the Transnational Turn in American (Cultural) Studies Abstract As a culmination of various interdisciplinary interventions, a growing body of scholarship has emerged under the rubric of “queer diaspora” (Gopinath, 2005). Intended as an interrogation of the concomitant relationship between processes of migration, sexual citizenship and belonging this intervention offers greater insight into the disciplinary constraints of nation-based fields of study, by centering the processes of social subjects rendered as “marginal” - the black, the queer, the migrant and so forth. With this context in mind, Jafari Sinclaire Allen, frames the arrival of black/queer/diaspora (as a field) as a “conjunctural” moment, that perhaps underscores the current limits of Black, Queer & Diaspora Studies that has been brought about by ongoing debates from within (Allen, 2012, 2016). Cultural Studies with its commitment to interdisciplinary practices has certainly shaped the trajectory of these debates by offering alternative hermeneutics for rendering socio-cultural landscapes - including the spatial configurations we currently term a “queer diaspora”.

Given this context, this presentation considers the recent trend towards an inventory of “identity knowledges” (Weigman, 2012) or more aptly what Roderick Ferguson terms the “interdisciplines” (Ferguson, 2012) to assess what is at stake when such fields are called upon to re-establish their utility by re-consolidating an essential or “core” social subject of analysis? Through a critique of Sharon Patricia Holland’s recent assessment that the transnationalization of American Cultural Studies risks negating the particularity of black life, and the quotidian manner in which racism manifests itself in the realm of knowledge production; this paper asks where and under what parameters does one render the black-queer-diasporic subject? Further, if such an assessment perhaps rests on a false dichotomy of particularity vs. differentiation, how does one account for the manner in which the bodily, affective and ephemeral exchanges of black-queer subjects who augment the tenor of local struggles while attendant to global concerns?

Bio

Christopher Smith PhD Candidate (ABD) Sociology in Education Dept. of Social Justice Education - OISE/University of Toronto

Joyce A. Joyce: (Temple University, USA) “Blacks Studies and the Black Aesthetic: Where do we go from Here?” Abstract In my book publication: Black Studies as Human Studies, published in 2005, I included interviews with Sonia Sanchez, Askia Toure, and Amiri Baraka in which they responded to the same five questions, regarding their views of the importance of Black Studies and their roles as faculty for the first Black Studies Program at San Francisco University. My proposed presentation/essay will address the interconnections between Black Studies Programs and the creative,pedagogical, and curricula representations of the Black Aesthetic. The paper will address how the commodification of Black Studies and the theoretical dominance of contemporary literary discourses have inhibited the original mission for Black Studies Programs and propose ways in which Black Studies Programs, taking their cues from the Black Arts Movement and its literary aesthetic, can re-energize their curriculum by establishing strong community-based initiatives and by including literary and historical transformative texts that are ignored by the literary elite.

Bio

Having earned her Ph.D. in English at the University of Georgia in 1979, Joyce A. Joyce has given one of two keynote presentations at the American Embassy in Paris at the “International Centennial Celebration of Richard Wright’s Birthday” and a keynote presentation at “Richard Wright 100,” an international conference held at the Universidade da Beira Interior in Coviha, Portugal. She has published articles on Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Walker, Arthur P. Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, E. Ethelbert Miller, Askia Touré, Gil Scott-Heron, and Sonia Sanchez. Her fields of concentration include African-American criticism and theory, African-American poetry and fiction, Black feminist theory, Black lesbian writers, and African Religion and Philosophy in Black in Black Women’s Fiction. Her monograph in progress is entitled “Kaleidoscopic Critical Reflections of the Black Arts Movement.”

PANEL 37 Global Diasporas, Local Presences: Making Homespace through Art Performance and Literature in the Black Atlantic (IBAR II) Alan Rice (IBAR, UCLAN) Chair Lisa Merrill (Hofstra University, NY, USA) and Theresa Saxon (IBAR, UCLAN): “African Americans on the (Post) Reconstruction Stage” Abstract While African American theatre of the 1880s to the 1900s generally has been regarded as emphasizing musicals and light comedy, financed by white producers, African American writers and performers explored drama in many different genres in this period. African American productions of a variety of dramatic types, from productions of Shakespeare to new plays, retell stories of black history and heroism. Additionally, many of the black performers we discuss here wrote, selected or starred in vehicles that consciously instructed or reflected on black history. Categories such as “amateur” and “professional” are not only meaningless at this time; they obscure both the material conditions of black artists’ lives, and lead to a potential devaluing or complete erasure of the theatre work black artists undertook, often while employed for most of their lives in other occupations. Much black theatre grew out of “amateur” troupes. Furthermore, the venues in which much black theatre was staged often were outside the limits of conventional theatrical spaces; located in parks, churches, concert venues and even private homes, as well as theatres. Moreover, the period 1880-1900 is marked by institutionalized segregation. Therefore, we note that audiences of 1880- 1900 were almost exclusively segregated, so performances were often directed at two distinct spaces within the theatre setting. We begin our investigation with a brief account of sisters Anna Madah and Emma Louise Hyers, whose work intersected with that of Pauline Hopkins in very significant ways and move through Henrietta Vinton Davis and John Edward Bruce and outdoor pageants and extravaganzas. We can see in such work ways that the African American performance tradition explores theatrical modes and asserts a series of alternative histories for black Americans. Thus the 1880- 1900 period of African American theatre should be recalibrated in critical terms as a period of diversity and vibrancy, experimentation and autonomy.

Bio Prof. Merrill's ongoing research and publications are in the fields of performance studies, American studies, critical race and cultural studies, and women's and gay and lesbian history. She has recently been awarded the Oscar G. Brockett Essay Prize from the American Society for Theatre Research and the Oscar G. Brockett Center for Theatre History and Criticism at the University of Texas-Austin for “Most Fitting Companions: Making Mixed-Race Bodies Visible in Antebellum Public Spaces,” published in Theatre Survey, May 2015. Professor Merrill was awarded the Eccles Centre Visiting Professorship in North American Studies at the British Library for 2010- 2011: “Performing Race and Reading Antebellum American Bodies.” Professor Merrill has received the National Endowment for the Humanities senior faculty research fellowship, (2002-2003). Dr. Merrill’s talks and appearances in Britain on nineteenth century performances of race in the abolition movement and onstage were sponsored, in part by Centre for the Study of International Slavery, Liverpool, England.

Hannah Durkin: (Newcastle University, UK) “You really are Stealing the Picture’: Eslanda Goode Robeson, Britain’s Black Screen Actress.” Abstract In a letter appraising Paul and Eslanda Goode Robeson’s work on British avant-garde film Borderline (1930), producer and fellow actress Bryher suggested to Eslanda that, “You really are stealing the picture. One knew that Mr. Robeson would be good – every time I see the film it is your acting and your sense of movement that amazes me. Even more than his – if this is not treason” (Bryher to Eslanda Robeson, 7 April 1930). Eslanda’s performance in Borderline was perhaps even more significant that Bryher realised as my research suggests that her role made her the first Black actress to appear in British cinema. This paper examines Eslanda Robeson’s construction and self-construction in Borderline. Her performance has been overshadowed by her husband Paul’s later screen success, which Eslanda played a key role in facilitating and which led to him becoming one of 1930s Britain’s most bankable film stars. Yet it is historically significant for several reasons. Her work can be held to mark the origin point of a Black female presence on the British screen. As a British avant-garde film, Borderline presented a counter-narrative to interwar Hollywood, where Black women were typically confined to maid roles. By contrast, Eslanda is able to project a highly sophisticated, fashionable presence onscreen. Her cerebral performance and racially ambiguous appearance interrogate the racial “borderline” that the camera seeks to establish through fixation on her husband Paul’s body. Finally, Eslanda’s off-screen interventions served as a platform for her later behind-the-scenes film work on her husband’s behalf. Bio Hannah Durkin is a Lecturer in Literature and Film at Newcastle University. Her current book project examines the work of early Black and Jewish women ethnographic filmmakers and she is also developing a project that investigates Black artists’ contributions to mid-century British visual culture. She is the author of a forthcoming monograph on the screen careers and writings of Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham contracted to Illinois University Press and co-editor with Celeste-Marie Bernier of Visualising Slavery: Art Across the African Diaspora (Liverpool University Press).

Alan Rice: (IBAR, UCLAN) “Vagrant Presences: Lost Children, the Black Atlantic and Northern England.” Abstract

Most articles about the Black Atlantic originate in the ocean with either middle passage woes or liberating sojourns, oceanic and free-floating or below-decks and chained these narratives have held us in their grip and determined our perspectives ever since internationalist Black Cultural Studies and its routed realities received a timely boost from Paul Gilroy’s epochal work The Black Atlantic in 1993. I want to start elsewhere in order to propose a more localised and vagabondish perspective, one often forged within the memory of Transatlantic passages but proposing new journeys, often tied to specific land-based locales the connection of which to African presence is often obscured and forgotten. I want to range across geographies and chronologies to propose a model for the Black Atlantic that is not hidebound by petty particularism and essentialism but will hopefully bring out synergies that link a travelling, performing vagrant, and escaped slave, James Johnson who finally finds a home in Oldham in the 1860s to an earlier proto-Anarchist, Robert Wedderburn visiting his aristocratic father outside Edinburgh in the late eighteenth century: and a circus performer, Pablo Fanque buried in Leeds in 1871 to a novelist from there, Caryl Phillips blackening Bronte country and a contemporary artist, Jade Montserrat burying herself with Yorkshire clay near Anne Bronte’s burial place in Scarborough. I will use my theories of guerrilla memorialisation and Michael Rothberg’s Multidimensional Memory frameworks to discuss these figures and their artworks/novels/narratives/biographies. Bio Alan Rice, Professor in English and American Studies at the University of Central Lancashire and Co-director of the Institute for Black Atlantic Research was academic advisor to the Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project in Lancaster (2001-8), and a co- curator of the Whitworth Art Gallery 2007-8 exhibition Trade and Empire: Remembering Slavery. His two monographs are Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (Continuum, 2003) and, Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic (Liverpool UP, 2010) He has organised landmark events on Black British history and has contributed to documentaries for Border Television, the BBC and Korean Television. He currently supervises two Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska- Curie Individual Fellowships (IF-EF) to the value of 500,000 Euros on Gothic Narratives of the Haitian Revolution & Womanism and Feminism in Transatlantic Black Cultures. His current project is a co-written monograph on the acclaimed and Preston-based Black British artist, Lubaina Himid

PANEL 38 A Kind of Blue: Jazz & Aesthetics in the work of Reed, Mosely and Baraka Cindy Hamilton (Liverpool Hope University, UK) Chair

Janée A. Moses: (University of Michigan, USA) “Amina Baraka’s Funky Blues People: Mah friend’s tongue is in Mah Mouf.” Abstract In LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s Blues People, he theorizes the blues—an art form particular to marked, Black Americans’ bodies and their experiences of North American slavery—by positing that American English is the form’s central component. For Jones/Baraka, the formerly enslaved mastered this language and found belonging inside of it—a kind of home. The blues becomes more evident than shouts and hollers: it is a final product of reckoning. Yet, Amina Baraka, Amiri’s second wife, conveys her gendered blues—an affect particular to Black American women who were wives of the revolution while simultaneously engaged in domesticity—in a language that is absent from the linguistic Hall of Fame in which Jones/Baraka has been inducted and reaches back to the traditions of blues women singers, speakers, and writers who do not rely on wholly “American” linguistic structures. In oral history interviews that I conducted in 2013 and 2014, she struggled to narrate her blues in American English, relying instead on songs and departing from “language”, gesturing toward a break, or practice of deviating from Jones/Baraka’s masculinist tradition and conjuring the words of the funky blues women who exist in a black women’s blues network. This paper explores the complexity of Amina’s particular blues, rooted in historical experiences of Black womanhood, domesticity, and the labor pains that are produced by complying with and resisting patriarchy in the Black radical tradition. Her testimony reveals the dubious nature of American English and highlights the dearth of voices in her likeness. While the male Baraka considers language to be a paradigm for producing the blues, the female Baraka demonstrates that language is a process never fully achieved by bodies peculiarly marked by race, sex, and experience of patriarchal traditions that restrict movement and truth telling for women. Amina illustrates the blues as an unending process of reconciling with her homeplace—America and the domestic sphere where black men help other black men maintain patriarchal traditions—such that the blues itself, not American English, is the essential language. Bio Janée A Moses is an oral historian and third-year doctoral student at the University of Michigan in the American Cultures Department. Her research centers upon the multiple roles of Black women who participated in various forms of the Black radical tradition and revolutionary politics throughout the twentieth century.

Marlene D. Allen: (United Arab Emirates University) “Walter Mosley’s Blue Light and the Journey Toward racial Treaty.”

Abstract Walter Mosley has enjoyed a critical acclaim and commercial success that has eluded many contemporary African American writers, largely due to his bestselling detective series featuring private investigator Easy Rawlins. However, in 1998 Mosley made a provocative departure from this successful series when he published his first work of science fiction, Blue Light. The work puzzled many literary critics, with one even observing that it would take a “great leap of faith” for Mosley fans to engage in the reading atmosphere of this provocative novel. Despite this assessment, I argue that Mosley’s Blue Light is a brilliant and bold piece of literary art that produces a highly original reading experience. While on the surface the novel seems to deviate from the issues about the African American experience that are at the core of Mosley’s other writings, upon closer examination the reader will see that Blue Light also weaves important aspects of African American cultural aesthetics into the science fiction genre. In fact, I argue that we can read Blue Light as a hybrid science fiction-blues novel, as Mosley uses the creative freedom of the science fiction genre to personify blues aesthetics into a group of people he literally calls “the Blues.” They are people who, after being struck by an interstellar blue light from an unknown source, are transformed into superhumans, or rather, as the novel’s narrator Chance Foote expresses, the Blues become “Platonic Ideals.” The Blues are blessed with such an enlightened consciousness that physical constructions like race and gender are inconsequential to them. Due to this, the Blues separate themselves from mainstream 1960s America in the novel and come to together to form a community they call Treaty, a separate space created by the Blues to get away from the racist tenor of the time. The journey that Chance Foote, the depressed and suicidal biracial protagonist of the novel, to reach the community of Treaty is metaphorically his journey for social acceptance in a time where people of mixed race were not allotted a social identity. We can thus read Blue Light as Chance’s extended, textual science fiction-blues song that expresses his personal tale of suffering as a biracial man in the racist atmosphere of 1960s America using the conventions of the science fiction genre to create a fascinating portrait of the destructive forces of racism.

Bio Marlene D. Allen is an assistant professor of English Literature at United Arab Emirates University. Her areas of research and teaching interests include fantasy and science fiction by African American writers, multicultural American literature, and the writings of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She is the coeditor of Afterimages of Slavery: Essays on Appearances in Recent American Films, Literature, Television, and Other Media (2012).

Cindy Hamilton: (Liverpool Hope University, UK) “Detective Fiction and its Discontents: ‘Mumbo Jumbo and the Ends of Realism.” Abstract The American Hard-boiled detective novel has become synonymous with realism. This view can be traced back to claims made by the influential editor of *Black Mask*, Joseph T Shaw, to W.H. Auden’s “The Guilty Vicarage” (1948), and to Raymond Chandler’s seminal essay, “The Simple Art of Murder” (1950); it is a realism defined in relation to the depiction of crime and corruption in the city, a milieu that facilitates the social criticism often associated with detective fiction of this type. In the wake of Franco Moretti’s “Clues” (1980), more recent critics have interrogated the extent to which the surface realism of detective fiction is essentially conservative, deflecting attention away from the inherent inequalities and injustices of capitalism. Moretti’s essay has precipitated debates over the progressive possibilities of hard-boiled detective fiction. However, a more fundamental critique of the realism of the genre is to be found in the detective fiction of African American writers who have felt compelled to bend the formula to reflect unacknowledged aspects of their reality. Thissituation was acknowledged somewhat indirectly by Stephen Soitos in *The Blues Detective *(1996)*. *It is time to look deeper than the tropes identified by Soitos as typical of African American detective fiction; thispaper will look at African American detective fiction in relation to the assumptions that underpin the Eurocentric realism of the genre, with particular attention to Ishmael Reed’s *Mumbo Jumbo. *

Bio

Cynthia S. Hamilton is Professor Emeritus of American Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool Hope University. She has served on the Board of CAAR as Secretary and is currently one of two General Editors of FORECAAST. Her monograph on *Sara Paretsky: Detective Fiction as Trauma Literature* (2015) was published by Manchester University Press.

16:45-17:00 COFFEE BREAK

17:00-17:30 PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS “Black Studies in the 21st Century-Global, Inclusive and Transformative: the Business of CAAR”. Violet Showers Johnson, Texas A & M University.

17:30-20:00 GENERAL ASSEMBLY CAAR

FRIDAY, 16 JUNE GREEN RAY BUILDING (University Campus Extension)

09:30-10:45 a.m WORKSHOPS 1,2,3

1. - Afropolitanism Dorothea Fischer-Hornung (Heidelberg University, Germany) Chair Abstract Just over a decade ago, Taiye Selasi (Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu) introduced the term “Afropolitan” in her essay, “Bye-Bye Babar (What Is An Afropolitan?).” There has been heated discussion around the concept ever since. She maintains that the “the young, gifted and broke”5 left Africa pursuing new opportunities, primarily in Canada, Britain, and the United States, but also in some Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War. The children of these Africans were born in these countries, growing up in a complex environmental mixture of African traditions and Western influences. Therefore, she asserts, Africans living or born outside of Africa, “form an identity along at least three dimensions: national, racial, cultural – with subtle tensions in between.”6

Resisting this concept of Afropolitan, Binyavanga Wainaina in his address, “I am a Pan- Africanist, not an Afropolitan” presented at the 2012 African Studies Association, UK, conference,7 maintains that Afropolitanism “has become the marker of crude cultural commodification – a phenomenon increasingly “product driven,” designed, focused, and potentially funded by the West.8 Thereafter, Achille Mbembe attempted to deterritorialize the term by emphasizing precolonial migrations within Africa. He moves the center of Afropolitanism from outside the continent to inside the continent, providing in particular Johannesburg as an example. Similarly, Carli Coetzee attempts to relocate the concept, not in terms of geographical location, but rather in terms of class situatedness in order to establish “the beginnings of an activist scholarly agenda in which ‘the Afropolitan’ is reimagined to include the stealthy figure crossing the Mediterranean by boat, and the Somali shopkeeper in a South African township.”9

Clearly, “Afropolitanism” is a term in troubled waters.

5 Selasi, Taiye, “Bye-Bye Babar (What Is An Afropolitan?)” (March 3, 2005). Accessed 15 October 2016. http://thelip.robertsharp.co.uk/?p=76. 6 Ibid. 7 The presentation has not been published; only secondary sources provided by attendees is available. 8 Stephanie Santana, “Exorcizing Afropolitanism: Binyavanga Wainaina explains why ‘I am a Pan-Africanist, not an Afropolitan’” at ASAUK 2012 (8 February, 2013). Accessed 17 October 2016. http://africainwords.com/2013/02/08/exorcizing-afropolitanism-binyavanga-wainaina-explains- why-i-am-a-pan-africanist-not-an-afropolitan-at-asauk-2012/. 9 Carli Coetzee, “Contemporary Conversations: Afropolitanism: Reboot” Journal of African Cultural Studies 28, No. 1 (2016): 101–103, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2015.1105129 What are we to make of Selasi’s often glib statements: “You’ll know us by our funny blend of London fashion, New York jargon, African ethics, and academic successes”; or what do we make of her alliterative and self-congratulatory list of identities: the “scattered tribe of pharmacists, physicists, physicians (and the odd polygamist) *which+ has set up camp around the globe.”? 10 ? Selasi asks: Why separate African urbanites from the rest of the urbanites?”11 Who (and where) are the audiences to whom she is speaking? What about important questions of class? What about the non-affluent African diaspora? And what about recent African migrants, particularly to Europe? Are Afropolitans “de-racialized” based on their class-situatedness? Does gender matter or appear in these discussions? How does Afropolitanism relate to other attempts to conceptualize movements among nation, class and race, in concepts such as the cultural mulatto, minority cosmopolitanism and transnational connectivities, or in mixed race studies? Do we need this new term? What work does it do? How can we distinguish Afropolitanism from pan-Africanism and négritude? How does it differ from terms like “Afrodiasporic” or “Afrodescended”? What does literature have to say about Afropolitanism? How can we read Afropolitanist novelists. as for example, Selasi (Ghana Must Go) Teju Cole (Open City), Chimamanda Adichie (Americanah) or various works by Caryl Phillips, and memoirs, for example, Chris Abani’s The Face: Cartography of the Void? How might readings of the poetry of African American writers such as Brenda Marie Osbey, Yusef Komunyakaa, Rita Dove, or Natasha Trethewey help us weigh the utility of this new term? Where does online “digital pulp” factor in? What do we make of the issue of “cultural appropriation” (see, Kaitlyn Greenidge, “Who gets to write what,” NY Times, Sept. 24, 2016)? What issues are raised when teaching and using the term Afropolitan and discussing Afropolitan cultural production in the classroom? Does Afropolitanism provide a useful framework? Does any of this really matter?

In order to facilitate an open forum rather than a more traditional individual paper- centered format, we would like to address this contested concept of “Afropolitanism” and the resulting tensions in a round table discussion, with at approximately half the session devoted to short statements by participants (5-10 minutes) and the second part with open-floor discussion.

Contributors: Souleymane Ba (Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier3, France) Monika Mueller (University of Bochum, Germany) Malin Pereira (University of North Carolina, Charlotte, USA) Isabel Soto (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, UNED, Spain)

10 Selasi, Taiye, “Bye-Bye Babar.” 11 Ibid. 2. - Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination. Ilka Saal (University of Erfurt, Germany) and Bertram D. Ashe: (University of Richmond, Virginia) Chair Abstract With this PANEL we seek to open up a conversation on how the literary, performance, and visual narratives of circum-Atlantic slavery have evolved over the past thirty years. We contend that the works of artists born in and/or coming of age after the end of the civil rights movement in the United States and post-1965 in Great Britain, respectively after the independence movements in the Caribbean reflect a very different ‘structure of feeling’ regarding the history and legacy of slavery than those of their immediate predecessors since different conceptions of freedom and identity are at play. The PANEL sets out to gauge this new structure of feeling that has been variously described as post-soul or post-black and to question the place and role of history in recent representations of blackness. In investigating the images, rhythms, and narratives deployed by today’s artists in grappling with the legacy of slavery, we are interested in tracing shifts of emphasis as well as continuities with the work of previous generations, such as the formative neo-slave narratives of the 1970s and 80s. At the same time, we also wish to underline relevant cultural differences within the contemporary African diasporic body of literary and visual art works addressing the afterlife of slavery.

The contributors to this PANEL discuss these issues with regard to a variety of artistic productions on stage, page, and screen, including Isaac Julien’s experimental short-film The Attendant (1993), Cheryl Dunye’s faux documentary The Watermelon Woman (1996), Brandon Jacob-Jenkins provocative play An Octoroon (2015) and Colson Whitehead’s latest novel The Underground Railroad (2016). Further contributions are welcome.

Bio

Ilka Saal is a Feodor Lynen Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the University of Toronto and also a Professor of American Literature at the University of Erfurt, Germany. She is the author of New Deal Theater: The Vernacular Tradition in American Political Theater (2007) and co-author/editor of Passionate Politics: The Cultural Work of American Melodrama from the Early Republic to the Present (2008), and has published several articles on contemporary US American theater and literature. She is currently at work on a monograph on recent visual and performative engagements with New World slavery in the works of Suzan-Lori Parks and Kara Walker.

Workshop members: Bertram D. Ashe: (University of Richmond, Virginia) “Plantation Memories: Cheryl Dunye’s Representation of a Representation of American Slavery in The Watermelon Woman.” Abstract At the core of The Watermelon Woman is a 1937 film called Plantation Memories. One of the stars of Memories, playing an enslaved woman, is an actress known only as The Watermelon Woman. On-screen filmmaker Cheryl Dunye’s determination to discover everything she can about The Watermelon Woman forms the narrative spine of the faux documentary. And yet, it is real life filmmaker Cheryl Dunye who directs the film that tracks character Cheryl Dunye’s research progress. Given the reality of historical time and distance, what’s fascinating is that the intentional duality and narrative framing of this film doesn’t so much view historical American slavery as such —the film expressly and intently examines representations of American slavery. Indeed, Dunye establishes a dual relationship with slavery—as director and character, on-screen and off—through the mediated character of The Watermelon Woman. Dunye directs herself on-screen as her viewing audience forms a relationship with clips from Plantation Memories that Dunye carefully frames and presents to her viewers. In the process, the faux-documentary sense of the film collapses the simplistic idea that this film is “history,” and asks important questions about the role of art to “tell black women’s stories,” as on-screen Dunye puts it. Ultimately, The Watermelon Woman displays the often-complicated relationship contemporary African-Americans in general—and post-black artists in particular—have with representations of American slavery.

Bio Bertram D. Ashe is Associate Professor of English at the University of Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of From Within the Frame: Storytelling in African-American Fiction (Routledge, 2002) and Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles (Agate, 2015) and has written extensively on contemporary black literature and post-soul culture.

Carol Bunch-Davis: (Texas A & M University of Galveston) “Into the Abyss: Slavery’s Iconography & Temporalityt in Brandoen Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (2015).” Abstract Drawing on An Octoroon’s published script, performance reviews, and criticism, this essay argues that the play intervenes in slavery’s framing within U.S. cultural memory as it meditates on slavery’s implications for African Americans identity in the current historical moment. In his appropriation of and challenge to black singularity in Dion Boucicault’s wildly popular 1859 play, The Octoroon, Jacobs-Jenkins not only points to African American identity’s multiplicity in his titular indefinite article in opposition to Boucicault’s definite article, but also recasts slavery’s iconography in its exploration of the “abyss of black time” or “time without duration…a time outside of temporality,” closing the historical distance between each play’s production (Harris 61-65). Recognizing Boucicault’s craft in melodrama, but also mindful of the play’s racist representations couched in anti-slavery rhetoric, Jacobs-Jenkins offers a sly response in An Octoroon that posits the slaves’ interiority as a rejoinder to Boucicault’s representations, but most significantly, provides the point of entry to black time’s abyss where the play takes seriously Calvin Harris’ notion that slavery “expresses itself in endless disguise” (Harris 67). As his alter ego BJJ cautions at the play’s outset “I don’t know what a real slave sounded like. And neither do you,” Jacobs-Jenkins imaginatively renders the house slave, the tragic mulatta, and the mammy grappling with their status as slaves on the Terrebonne Plantation by putting contemporary dialogue as well as cross-racial casting and Brechtian addresses to the audience in the service of its journey through black time and its explorations of black interiority. Further, the play rejects the narrative authority of anti-slavery texts such as Boucicault’s and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin within U.S. cultural memory as it emphasizes the slaves’ interiority. Ultimately, An Octoroon simultaneously calls attention to the continuities between slavery’s expression in the current historical moment and in the previous historical moment.

Harris, Calvin. “Black Time: Slavery, Metaphysics, and the Logic of Wellness.” The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Expressive Culture. Eds. Soyica Diggs Colbert, Robert J. Patterson, & Aida Levy-Hussen. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2016. Jacobs-Jenkins, Branden. An Octoroon. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2015.

Bio

Carol Bunch Davis is Associate Professor of English in the Department of Liberal Studies at Texas A & M University at Galveston. Her book Prefiguring Postblackness: Cultural Memory, Drama and the African American Freedom Struggle of the 1960s was published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2015. She is currently at work on a new book manuscript, Time to Live: The Sylvester Outley Story, which details Outley’s life journey from years of criminality and incarceration in southeast Texas to founding Philadelphia’s successful residential recovery program SELF, Inc.

Katharina Motyl: (University of Tübingen, Germany) “Foreseeing Freer Black Futures: Afrofuturist Prefigurations of the Past in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad.” Abstract Cora, the protagonist of Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad (2016), escapes captivity on a Georgia plantation in 1850 with the aid of a literal underground railroad and symbolically lives through events that prefigure post-emancipation African American history on her journey north. Whitehead’s rendering the underground railroad literal and his treatment of temporality make his novel Afrofuturist, which at once locates UR in the tradition of the “post-soul aesthetic” while setting it apart from the neo-slave narratives of the 1960s-80s, and intervening against contemporary Afro- Pessimist cosmologies. While the aforementioned neo-slave narratives largely locate “the past in the present” by exploring the reverberations of slavery for post- emancipation black lives, in a complex gesture, Whitehead points toward future events (from a 1850 perspective) that will have happened / are still occurring to black Americans by 2016. This Afrofuturist device also sets UR apart from contemporary negotiations of slavery by African American authors and philosophers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Frank Wilderson, III. Although Whitehead shares the Afro-Pessimist concern for how figurations of confinement and brutalization have persisted in post- emancipation African American history, the Afro-Pessimist figure of thought is a backward spiral that links events in post-emancipation history (for instance, the hyperincarceration of African Americans) back to slavery, whereas UR's logic is that of a forward spiral: UR foresees futures in which black people will be freer (the comparative is key here) from the oppressive structures and ideologies the impact of which on black psyches the novel so astutely assesses.

Bio

Katharina Motyl is a postdoctoral scholar at the Department of American Studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany. She has a first book forthcoming on Arab American literature since 9/11 and is currently at work on a second book project, a cultural history of substance addiction from the Early Republic to the War on Drugs.

3. - Multimodal Mixing: Interdisciplinary Methods to Exploring Identity, orality and Power to Black/African Diasporas Suban Nur Cooley ( Michigan State University) Chair

Suban Nur Cooley: (Michigan State University) “Gurigey Meeye to hoygaygii Waa Halkee? Nomad seeking the sensation of home” Abstract Each PANEList explores the ways in which storytelling can be used to disrupt often homogenized experiences of Black female bodies as part of a Black/African diaspora. Group membership and resistance is rarely examined through the transmission of stories through the lens of diasporic communities themselves. Stories provide physical and temporal landscapes from which to map experiences that continue to be silenced. Stories are crucial in creating sites of reclamation and resistance. This PANEL will use multimodal mixing (a term we invoke to mean the incorporation of music, video, audio, installation, storytelling, performance and other creative practice) in exploring themes of home, identity, self and systems of power. The PANELists also examine where form, content and context meet, remain distinct and in some cases are considered inseparable. Stories that are provoked through multimodal mixing act as theoretical interventions that move outside discourses of constructed identity; their very nature fluid, flexible and attempting to situate new notions of self. Workshop members: Bio Suban Nur Cooley is a Somali writer, spoken word artist, and storyteller. Most of what she writes is focused on experience, memory, and diasporic identity and its many intersections. She is currently the managing editor of Capital Gains Media and a graduate research assistant at Michigan State University where she is pursuing her doctoral degree in rhetoric and writing. Her research interests are focused on identity formation, digital technologies, and displacement. Furthermore, she wants to look closely at how identity is affected by memory, assimilation, and forced migration. Through her future work, she hopes to break the one-sided narrative of Somalis in the media and beyond.

Shewonda Leger: (Michigan State University) “ Fixing The Standard: The Black Women’s Reclamation Of Power” Bio Shewonda Leger is a doctoral student in Rhetoric and Writing, focusing in Cultural Rhetorics and Feminist Filmmaking at Michigan State University. Her research explores methodologies for teaching and interacting with diasporic black women’s cultural practices. Through her scholarly articles and documentary films, she aims to create academic spaces for discourse around Haitian women’s embodied cultural and learning practices.

10:45-11:00 a.m COFFEE BREAK

11:00-12:30 WORKSHOP PLENARY by Donato Ndongo, Journalist, Writer, Activist: “The Migration and the Black Experience of Africans in Spain.”

12:45-14:00 p.m WORKSHOPS 4,5,6

4. Black Mobilities in the Americas Astrid Haas (University of Wuppertal, Germany) Chair Abstract Practices and discourses of mobility have been crucial for the black experience in the Americas. As early as before the arrival of the European conquistadors, African seafarers crossed the Atlantic and interacted with the continent’s indigenous civilizations. Later, the spread of slavery in the region and its contributions to an early globalized economy depended on the mobile placement and displacement of unfree black labor across the hemisphere. The various stages and movements of black liberation in the Americas resulted to a considerable extent on diaspora’s political— discursive as well as corporeal—mobilization, from the first slave revolts to Black Lives Matter. Black diasporic cultural expressions in verbal testimony and narrative, music and dance, or the visual arts, too, not only resulted from various forms of black mobility in the Americas and beyond but, in turn, also sought to engender such mo- bilities themselves. The proposed workshop explores forms and developments of Black diasporic mobilities in the Americas from the colonial era to the present. It thereby seeks to bridge the often separately studied fields of Black Studies, Inter-American Studies, and Mobility Studies in order to complement the hitherto hegemonic discourses of the African diasporic mobilities between of the Black Atlantic between Africa, Europe, and (especially the Northern part of) the Western hemisphere. Of particular interest here are, on the one hand, the intersectionalities between the social identity categories of race/ethnicity, gender, class, and nationality in the context of Afro-diasporic mobilities in the Americas and, on the other hand, the interaction between narrative practices and social discourses. This includes especially the articulation of socio-cultural experiences in oral or written communal and individual narratives as well as the function of narratives and narration in the socio-cultural formation of individual and collective identities. The workshop contains the following presentations but may be complemented by the conference organizers with individual paper proposals fitting into the workshop concept. Workshop members: Astrid Haas: “African American Narratives of Indian Captivity” Abstract The Indian Captivity Narrative constitutes one of the first genres of narrative text genuine to post-contact North American letters as well as one of the most fundamental vehicles for - at times critically - reflecting upon conflictive encounters with indigenous nations on the continent. The vast majority of this texts was penned by white writers, in particular English and Anglo American women settlers, about their own experiences of captivity with indigenous nations as well as their liberation and return to their original communities. In a similar vein, most scholarship on the genre exclusively studies this text corpus, its perspectives and concerns. Against this backdrop of the canonical white-authored and -perspectivist Indian Captivity Narrative, the proposed paper looks at the much smaller and little researched body of autobiographical texts by African Americans that testify to black peoples’ experiences with indigenous bondage. In contrast to the narratives of white writers that tend to focus solely on their captivity, its meaning for and impact on the narrators’ lives, a number of relevant black-authored texts integrates an episode of Amerindian bondage within larger autobiographical narratives. Some of them even offer a comparative depiction of Indian captivity and the Euro-American practice of black slavery in North America. Taking the examples of John Marrant’s spiritual autobiography Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant (1785) and James Beckwourth’s adventurer memoir Life and Adventures of James P. Beckworth (1856), the paper examines the specificities and shared characteristics of black-authored narratives of Amerindian bondage, on the one hand, and their thematic and ideological diversity, on the other. Bio

Astrid Haas, Ph.D. English and American Studies University of Wuppertal Germany

Gabriele Pizarz-Ramirez: (University of Leizpig, Germany) “Rebellious Mobility: Pirates and Fugitives in Antebellum Narratives of the Caribbena Rimlands”

Abstract In my paper I explore the figures of the fugitive and the pirate in texts situated in and around the Florida peninsula. Fugitive slaves who escaped from Southern plantations to the Florida swamps, just as those fleeing to the Bahamas or becoming part of the “motley crews” of sailors, pirates, and wreckers traversing –and often endangering- Caribbean marine and coastal areas, presented a challenge to the symbolic order of American nationalism. American governments’ desire to control the entirety of their southern coastline and the territory of Florida was guided by the aim to prevent fugitive traffic to inaccessible regions or to areas beyond US borders. I will discuss the swamp and the pirate’s ship as sites of rebellious black mobility where racial hierarchies are upturned. In particular, I aim to read John Howison’s “The Florida Pirate” (1821) and Joshua Giddings’ Exiles of Florida (1858) as texts announcing and re- presenting what Martha Schoolman has described in Abolitionist Geographies as a “Caribbeanization” of antislavery discourses. While Howison’s text (the story of a former slave who became captain of a pirate ship) was published shortly after Florida had become part of the U.S. and went through nine different editions in subsequent years, Giddings’ history of black fugitive slave resistance against US troops appeared at the height of antislavery debates in the years before the Civil War. I read both texts’ representation of black rebelliousness in the context of national anxieties about the “mobility” of black radical thought across the Caribbean basin that raised the specter of violent slave uprisings in the U.S.

Jacqueline Couti: (University of Kentucky, USA) “Within the Power of the Circle: French Caribbean Dance, Rhythm, Spirit, and Transcendence Abstract My presentation will give a historical but concise survey of French Caribbean dance. My discussion will also explore how that type of dance can be a vehicle of resistance and transcendence for individuals who are disconnected from both their culture and their past. This disconnection influences not only their present but also their future. The ways in which islanders may (mis)understand their own culture through dance and music show how easy it is to forget or repress a past deemed unsuitable. I particularly question the influence of black ancestral roots on individuals who seek out bourgeois ideals of propriety inculcated by the Western world while they forget their own traditions. For that purpose, I will look at Guadaloupean author Gisèle Pineau’s novel Macadam Dreams. The novel explores the violence and poverty women on the island have been experiencing in the transformation of Guadaloupe from a colonial to a post- colonial society after World War II. I will particularly analyze the text’s protagonist Eliette, an older woman who despises Gwo-ka, the traditional dance and music and a diasporic heritage from West African rhythmic techniques, which she finds lascivious, animalistic, an uncivilized. Pineau opens her narrative with the arrival of the powerful hurricane Hugo, about to hit Guadeloupe in September 1989. The hurricane creates fear and disbelief in Savane- Mulet, a community of lower class black people already in disarray, now called Ti- Ghetto. Eventually, dancing to the Drum-ka Eliette demonstrates her resilience and spirit; she no longer fears the upcoming hurricane. Her dancing manifests a power that lies in the mighty-drum and that can make an old woman love her body and dance as if her life depended on it. She illustrates how through the spirituality of music, the fragmented body and soul can become whole again.

5. Diasporic Black Music and Transnational Encounters Rocío Cobo (University of Cadiz, Spain) Chair

Workshop members: Maria Frías: (University of A Coruña, Spain) “ Nights of Flamenco and Blues. B.B. King and Raimundo Amador: What Do they Have in Common?” Abstract The aim of this brief comparative presentation is to take the audience on a journey through the history of Flamenco and Blues to see to what extent these apparently different artistic expressions share some specific traits. Separated in time and geography, the work of poets like African American Langston Hughes, and Spanish Federico García Lorca—to name just two—prove that soul music and the duende of cante hondo speak a common language: they both come from a people who have been historically oppressed, but who have nevertheless embraced the beauty of the oral tradition, and expressed the need to laugh/sing to keep from crying. On July 19, 2002, I had the opportunity to interview B.B. King and Raimundo Amador on the occasion of their joint concert “Noche de Flamenco y Blues” *Night of Flamenco and Blues] held at the Plaza de Toros in Salamanca. Their respective feelings about the two musical traditions set me off on this voyage of discovery. Their genuine mutual respect for each other’s past, and their knowledge and admiration for each other’s art sent me on this search. It did not matter that neither B.B. King or Raimundo Amador could speak each other’s languages. B.B. King’s guitar, Lucille, and Raimundo Amador’s Gerundina spoke volumes about the legacy of African American folk tradition, and the cultural heritage of the Roma/Gitanos’s community in Spain, respectively. Let us listen to them. Bio María Frías is a former teacher at Duke University, a Visiting Scholar at the University of Ghana, and a Fellow at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and American Research at Harvard University. Her work has appeared in Callaloo, Wasafiri, Transition, among others. She is currently Assistant Professor at the University of A Coruña (Spain) where she teaches courses in African American Literature, and the Literatures of the African Diaspora. Together with other colleagues, she brings her primary research interest to the center of the Spanish academic syllabus-- with an emphasis on black women's fiction, black women's gender theories and cultural studies.

Dale Moodley: (University of Seville, Spain) “Black Female Sexuality in Hip-Hop Music: a Site of tension, Pleasure and Complexity.” Abstract This paper explores the extent to which stereotypically offensive and misogynistic representations of black women’s sexuality as common tropes in hip-hop music are reproduced and/or challenged in ‘Beez in the trap’, a song performed by Nicki Minaj, a Trinidadian-American female rapper. The lyrical content and music video accompanying the aforementioned song are adapted as texts and discursively read for the subject positions made available therein through which black female sexuality is constructed. Of concern in this paper are what conclusions can be drawn from black women in hip-hop music whose bodies represent a site of sexual spectacle in ways that pander to a male gaze, and are premised on a long-standing history of black female sexuality constructed as deviant and hypersexual. ‘Beez in the trap’ constructs multiple yet contradictory subject positions through which Minaj’s sexuality is mediated, by 2 juxtaposing racially fuelled masculine and, at times exaggerated, feminine stereotypes found in, but not limited to, hip-hop music. Minaj is depicted as a sexually explicit desirable and desiring subject, specifically as a stripper and gangster that constructs her as a sexually powerful and threatening woman. As sexually desirable, she is also portrayed ironically, at times, as girlish and a Barbie-doll which construct her as sexy yet comical, bordering on hysterical. The multiple representations show that the sexually explicit objectification of black women, when appropriated ironically and deconstructively, has the potential to construct sexual agency for black female musicians, in hip-hop, in ways that resist, rework and ridicule universal ideals about the aesthetics of feminine beauty and female sexuality associated with whiteness. Accordingly, the politics of black women’s sexual subjectivity is invoked through the practice of raunch culture to show not only how gender and race intersect but also the degree to which these identities are continuously complex and contested. Bio Dale Moodley is a registered psychologist and postdoc based in the The Department of English and North American Literature at the University of Seville. He is on a freestanding postdoctoral fellowship awarded by the NRF (National Research Fund) based in South Africa. His research, at present, looks at representations of gender and sexuality in contemporary popular music. His research interests also include joining the conversation on combining psychoanalysis and poststructuralism in order to theorise about gendered sexualities as areas of ongoing complex subjectivity

Josep Pedro: (Complutense University Madrid, Spain) “Appropriating Black Music: The Origins of Jazz and Blues in Spain.”

Abstract The aim of this communication is to bring a further understanding about the history of African-American music in Spain, particularly of jazz and blues, and about the particular forms in which it has been appropriated historically. Like in other European countries, jazz culture, music and dance began to penetrate Spain after WWI, soon becoming a disputed, wide-ranging, and yet not always visible symbol of modernity. African-American bandleader Sam Wooding, who visited Barcelona and Madrid in 1926, is considered the first authentic jazz musician to perform in Spain (García, 2012: 25; Pujol, 2005: 33). Other significant African-American artists such as Louis Douglas, Harry Flemming, Josephine Baker, and Benny Carter would soon follow. The gradual development of a national blues scene stemmed out of the complex intercultural reception of “jazz” –an umbrella term that included different forms of dance and improvised music along with blues, gospel and spirituals. Historically more resistant than jazz to global trends, mass culture and propaganda, blues music was initially integrated within jazz culture, and was frequently discovered by specialized jazz aficionados who particularly valued its authenticity, aesthetic influence, and expressive power. By focusing on the period between 1926 and 1956, I intend to provide a general overview of the “origins” of jazz and blues in Spain –a period which is still to be conceptualized and discussed. I will explore its historical reception and development by considering significant performances and recordings by foreign and local musicians, as well as media discourses that approach jazz, blues and black music, often in relation to authenticity, blackness, identity and politics. I have chosen the time frame 1926-1956 because of two important events: Sam Wooding’s groundbreaking performances in 1926, and the release in 1956 of Jazz Flamceno (RCA) –a pioneering and politically significant album recorded by Lionel Hampton in Madrid. Throughout this period, both jazz music and Spain underwent profound transformations. Jazz evolved from 3 traditional hot jazz (deeply in debt with the New Orleans tradition) into swing, bebop and modern jazz. Spain’s political situation was unstable: there was a dictatorship led by Primo de Rivera (1923-1930); a republican government (1931-1939); and a cruel Civil War (1936-1939) that led to a changing yet essentially unitary forty-year dictatorship directed by General Franco (1939-1975). Therefore, both the stylistic variations and the political context will be relevant to understand how jazz was appropriated by Spanish musicians, audiences and associations. In order to explore this complex period, I rely on my previous research about the history of blues in Spain –part of which has already been presented in conference talks and publications (Pedro, 2017). Furthermore, through the more unitary idea of “black music”, I will necessarily broaden my research perspective by focusing on jazz and blues, as well as on their relationship. Ultimately, I will provide a historical framework that situates, categorizes, and analyses popular music history and media discourses about jazz and blues within Spain’s changing sociopolitical context. Bio Josep Pedro is a pre-doctoral researcher (FPU contract) at Complutense University of Madrid. His dissertation focuses on musical appropriation, dialogue, and hybridization processes in the blues scenes of Austin, Texas and Madrid. His articles have been published in journals such as IASPM Journal, Atlantic Studies, The Journal of Texas Music History, and Revista Transcultural de Música, and he has contributed chapters to The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter, Talking Back to Globalization: Texts and Practices, and Jazz and Totalitarianism, among others.

6. - Charting the Transitions: Biographical and Editorial Work on African American Writers. John Cullen Gruesser (Kean University, USA) & Hanna Wallinger (University of Salzburg, Austria)

Abstract

This workshop will address the manifold challenges facing biographers of African American writers and editors of texts by these authors. These challenges involve, on the one hand, the lack of biographical materials and the difficulties of searching for information in physical archives, and, on the other hand, the wealth of material available through digital archives. While biographers have to tackle the many problems involved in the process of life writing, editors have to produce scholarly editions that are accurate with respect to the texts, consistent and explicit with respect to methods, and appropriate with respect to editorial principles and practices.

PANELists: Vincent Carretta: (University of Maryland, USA) “The Biographical Challenge of the Early Black Atlantic: The Case of Phillis Wheatley.” Abstract This paper addresses the challenge of reconstructing the lives of early black authors in general, and of Phillis Wheatley in particular. With the publication in London in 1773 of her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, Phillis Wheatley (1753?–1784) became the first English-speaking person of African descent to publish a book, and only the second America woman—of any race or background— to do so. Written in Boston while she was just a teenager, and when she was still a slave, Wheatley’s book made her an international celebrity. The paper discusses the likely role that Wheatley played in the production, marketing, and distribution of her writing by developing a remarkable transatlantic network that transcended racial, class, political, religious, and geographical boundaries. Reconstruction of that network sheds new light on Wheatley’s religious and political identities. The paper also tells how the mystery of the identity of Wheatley's husband was solved. Wheatley is re-located from the margins to the center of her eighteenth-century transatlantic world, revealing the fascinating life of a woman who rose from the indignity of enslavement to earn wide recognition, only to die in obscurity a few years later. And who had to wait more than two centuries to be the subject of a full biography.

Bio

Vincent Carretta, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Maryland, specializes in eighteenth-century transatlantic historical and literary studies. In addition to more than one hundred articles and reviews on a range of eighteenth- century subjects, Carretta has published two books on verbal and visual Anglophone political satire between 1660 and 1820, as well as authoritative editions of the works of Olaudah Equiano, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Phillis Wheatley, and other eighteenth-century transatlantic authors of African descent. Carretta’s most recent books are Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (2005); The Life and Letters of Philip Quaque The First African Anglican Missionary (2010), co-edited with Ty M. Reese; and Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (2011); and an edition of Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (2015). His current projects include a new edition of the writings of Phillis Wheatley

John Cullen Gruesser: (Kean University, USA)

“Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century African American Biography, Gender, and the Digital Age: Pauline Hopkins and Sutton Griggs.”

Abstract

Until recently little was known about the personal and professional lives of many early African American writers and, as a result, scholars and critics could only contextualize their texts to a limited degree. However, this situation has begun to change in some instances, as hundreds if not thousands of newspapers, local and national, African American and mainstream, have been digitized. In the cases of the Northern editor, journalist, lecturer, and multi-genre author Pauline Hopkins (1859-1930) and the lesser-known Southern novelist, publisher, polemicist, and orator Sutton Griggs (1872- 1933), gender plays a significant role. A search of historical newspaper databases for articles about Hopkins results in only a handful of previously unknown biographical tidbits; thus, large portions of her life remain, frustratingly, undocumented. In contrast, digitization has now made it possible to chart Griggs's activities on a yearly and often a monthly, a weekly, and even a daily basis. A very different Sutton Griggs has emerged from these materials: a dynamic figure, often embroiled in controversy, who devoted himself to literature for a much longer period and to a much more profound extent than has ever been previously imagined. Griggs's status as a religious leader in Nashville and Memphis who was actively involved in the enormously influential but woefully understudied National Baptist Convention, combined with his ability to issue his writings through his own publishing concerns, accounts in large part for the substantial difference in the amount of digitized material available related to him and Hopkins.

Bio

Professor of English at Kean University, John Gruesser is the editor of The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1996) and John Edward Bruce's The Black Sleuth (2002) and the co-editor (with Hanna Wallinger) of Loopholes and Retreats: African American Writers and the Nineteenth Century (2009) and Sutton E. Griggs's The Hindered Hand (2017).

Hanna Wallinger: (University of Salzburg, Austria) “Reliability in a Scholarly Edition: The Case of Sutton E. Grigg’s the Hindered Hand.” Abstract Since reliability is the foremost aim of scholarly editions, most of them include a general introduction, explanatory annotations, a statement or a series of statements about the history of the text, an appropriate textual apparatus, and some supplementary material. All of these are debated issues when it comes down to finalizing a scholarly edition. In the case of The Hindered Hand, a 1905 novel by Sutton Griggs (1872-1933), the annotations and supplementary material turned out to be especially complex. What would a modern reader not know about or of historical facts (lynching, segregation, for example), references to historical persons (Thomas Dixon, Jr., Charles Sumner, for example), and allusions to other texts (the Bible, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example)? How far should annotations go, where should they be placed and how long should supplementary materials be? This presentation will discuss some of the challenges that an early text raises when it is made available in a scholarly edition.

Bio Hanna Wallinger, Associate Professor of American Studies at Salzburg University in Austria, is the author of Pauline E. Hopkins: A Literary Biography (2005), editor of Transitions: Race, Culture, and the Dynamics of Race (2006), and co-editor (with John Gruesser) of Loopholes and Reatreats: African American Writers and the Nineteenth Century (2009) and Sutton E. Griggs’s The Hindered Hand, a scholarly edition (2017).

i Gullah for “How are you all doing?”