Currents of the Black Atlantic

13-14 March 2014
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Ave
New York, NY

Opening Keynote: David Scott, Columbia University

Closing Keynote: Sibylle Fischer, New York University

CFP deadline: Abstracts of 300 words or less electronically to BlackAtlanticCurrents@gmail.com by 31 December 2013.

Two decades since its publication, Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) united conversations about race, place, diaspora, and slavery within the Atlantic world. This interdisciplinary conference takes as its point of departure Gilroy’s ethos of looking outside of and challenging established categories (such as those determined by nationalist modes of thought). In the spirit of thinking both with and beyond the Black Atlantic paradigm this conference seeks to create a space for scholars to negotiate its theoretical limits while gesturing towards alternative frames and futures for the Black Atlantic. This interdisciplinary conference revisits the roots and routes, the genealogies and the futures, of The Black Atlantic.

This conference invites critical and methodological conversations among students and faculty who have been theorizing ways that rethink diaspora, transatlantic cultures, race, historiographies, and notions of “modernity.” This conference aims to bring together scholars across disciplines and bridge conversations that will shift the grounds, directions, and temporalities of the Black Atlantic.

Potential topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • Memory, Subjectivity, and the Black Diaspora
  • Remapping the Spatiotemporalities of the Black Atlantic
  • Early Modern Atlantic Crossings and Early Transatlantic Exchanges
  • Engenderings and Queerings of the Black Atlantic
  • Sounds and Music of the Middle Passage
  • Transatlantic Affective Economies
  • Black Atlantic Matter(s): Things and Objects of the Middle Passage
  • Ethics, Archives, and Historiographies of the Black Atlantic
  • The Black Pacific; Intersections of Race and Labor
  • Latin American and/or Caribbean Studies and the Black Atlantic

This is the annual conference of the English Student Association at the CUNY Graduate Center. Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words, along with a 3-5 line bio, contact information, and a/v requests to BlackAtlanticCurrents@gmail.com. Additionally, feel free to submit abstracts as a fully formed panels and/or roundtables. We also welcome suggestions for non-traditional conference presentations. The deadline for abstracts and other proposals is December 31st, 2013. Participants will be notified by the end of January.

The above was adapted from the circulated CFP. For more information, visit the conference website.