Philosophy Born of Struggle XXI 2014 Annual Meeting
Forging Concepts through Struggle: The New Slave—Racism, Empire, and Sexual Violence.
31 October – 1 November 2014
Paine College, Augusta, Georgia.
Call for Papers
Submission Deadline: 1 August 2014
Submission Guidelines: Email a Microsoft Word document including the title, abstract, institutional affiliation, rank or occupation, and email address to: aneal@paine.edu
Over the last decade, the worsening plight of Blacks in the United States has raised fundamental questions about reconciling democracy with poverty, freedom with statism and government surveillance, and the idea of racial progress with the routinized deaths/murders of Black men, women and children. These realities have led some to ask a deeper question: Did slavery ever really end, or do Blacks around the world still effectively live in chains?
The thought of Blacks as NEW SLAVES has led recent scholars to reformulate questions of race, class, and gender into more complex notions of empire, neo-liberalism, and sexual violence. This reformulation has drawn on and reshaped resources from a variety of sources. Africana philosophy, Latin American philosophy, (post) structuralism/ (post) colonialism, psychoanalysis, and anti-colonial thought have loomed large, as have the works of literary, visual, and performing artists.
The 2014 meeting of Philosophy Born of Struggle takes up these questions and resources. Hosted this year at Paine College in Augusta, Georgia, Philosophy Born of Struggle asks for papers and panels looking to explore the complex obstacles towards freedom, or more accurately stated, how the conditions, values, and institutions PBOS have made synonymous to “being free,” have in fact concealed and consolidated the long afterlife of slavery.
Research questions include: How has our present arrangements of knowledge (disciplinarity) prevented us from seeing the reality oppression before us? What kind of philosophical practices have been or need to be erected to deal with the specificity of historical sexual violence (e.g. sexual violence of men, women, and children under enslavement)? Are there resources in racial contract theory to remedy the contemporary tendencies for advanced postindustrial societies to oppress Blacks in unforeseen and unanticipated ways? In what ways can ideal political theory contribute to the liberation of Blacks in our current political and social environment, especially given its historical association and complacency with empire? What is the theoretical and political utility of maroonage under this new system of slavery? How might Angela Davis’ approach of abolition democracy, first explored by Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois, help remedy present day oppression faced by many Blacks, especially the Black underclass and incarcerated Blacks, in the United States and throughout the world? How do the theories of Caribbean theorists like CLR James, Frantz Fanon, Éduoard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter, and others play in shifting/expanding our concepts of resistance and revolt? What does the work and lives of Steve Biko, Nelson Mandela, Amiri Baraka, and Sonya Sanchez teach us about violence, poetry, and love under oppression? How has Hip-Hop and other Black aesthetics responded to this New SLAVE?
PBOS is an interdisciplinary and open philosophical community. PBOS welcome interlocutors from all traditions, including but not limited to Afrocentrism, womanism, feminism, queer theory, Marxism, Pan-Africanism, pragmatism, and existentialism. PBOS also welcome participants regardless of discipline and without regard for tenure status or professional affiliation. For more information visit the website: http://pbos.com/
Message adapted from CFP announcement.
