The Performance of Pan-Africanism: from Colonial Exhibitions to Black and African Cultural Festivals

20-22 October, 2016
Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies
Florida State University

CFP deadline: Submit proposals electronically here by 1 February 2016.

Call for Papers:

In April 1966, thousands of artists, musicians, performers and writers from across Africa and its diaspora gathered in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, to take part in the First World Festival of Black and African Culture (Premier Festival Mondial des arts nègres). The festival constituted a highly symbolic moment both in the era of decolonization and the push for civil rights for African Americans in the United States. In essence, the festival sought to perform an emerging pan-African culture, to give concrete cultural expression to the ties that would bind the African ‘homeland’ to black people in the diaspora. On the occasion of the 50^th anniversary of Dakar ’66, this conference seeks to examine the festival and its multiple legacies, in order to help us better to understand both the utopianism of the 1960s and the ‘festivalization’ of Africa that has occurred in recent decades. The conference is also interested in exploring the role of colonial exhibitions and world’s fairs in establishing a set of representational frameworks that would later be contested but also sometimes (unwittingly) adopted by black/African groups in the aftermath of the Second World War. Continue reading The Performance of Pan-Africanism

Call for submissions to multi-generic anthology

CFP deadline: 30 March 2015

From emailed CFP:

Despite signs of economic recovery, millions of Americans from all walks of life are still experiencing tough economic times. With the reduction in food stamps and other welfare benefits, rise in college tuition across the nation, and continued high unemployment among some of the most marginalized in our society ( the poor, the elderly, and the youth, for example) many people are still having difficulty making ends meet. In addition, racial tensions have gotten even higher than usual fueled by recent incidents of racial profiling and police brutality, and nationwide protests against these incidents by a wide cross section of people.

Our anthology, Tough Times in America, aims to provide a platform for telling diverse stories about “tough times” from multiple perspectives. We will accept true stories, as well as “fictionalized” versions of real life events. This collection aims to preserve and document narrative accounts of the anger, fear and frustration that most Americans are feeling due to massive job losses, loss of homes, loss of healthcare, reduced retirement benefits, police profiling and police brutality, etc. We also hope to document the hope and gratitude that bloom even in the midst of despair—true testaments to the tenacity of the human spirit. Significantly, we would like this collection to reflect the diversity of America in the 21st century, and so we welcome submissions from people from all ethnicities, racial, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds.

Fiction should be between 1500 to 4000 words. Times New Roman or similar sized font (12 point). Stories must be previously unpublished in any form, including print, web etc. Each story should be identified within the geographic location/landmark of the city in which it is set. We will consider stories from all around the Americas (yes, this includes the Caribbean and Latin America). For our poetry selections, we will consider up to 3 poems per author. We welcome established as well as unpublished writers who would like to represent their experiences or the experiences of their friends and loved ones as well as fictional accounts. Deadline for submissions: 30 March 2015.

Please send your submissions to: Dr. Donna Aza Weir-Soley: ([email protected]) and Max Freesney Pierre ([email protected]).

Dr. Weir-Soley is an Associate Professor of English at Florida International University. She is the author of First Rain, Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women’s Writings, and co-editor of the anthology Caribbean Erotic (Peepal Tree Press).

Max Freesney Pierre is an Adjunct Professor of English at Florida International University and a former administrator at Miami-Dade College. Pierre is a poet/writer/journalist, the author of Tambours de la Mêlée, Fée Caraïbe, Soul Traveler and Le chant de l’apaisement.

Call for Papers

African and Caribbean Theatre and Performance Working Group

Theme: Theatre and Performance in African/Caribbean Cultures of Democracy

International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR) Conference,

 Hyderabad, India, 5-10 July 2015

The African and Caribbean Theatre and Performance (ACTP) Working Group will meet during the forthcoming IFTR conference in Hyderabad from 5^th to 10^th July 2015. The IFTR conference theme, “Theatre and Democracy”, invites participants to explore how theatre engages democracy with attention to various historical and culturally specific practices, institutions, notions, principles, etc. (See the IFTR Hyderabad website at http://www.iftr2015hyd.in for full details).

For the 2015 meeting of the African and Caribbean Theatre and Performance Working Group of IFTR, we call for papers that respond to the wider conference theme with African and Caribbean perspectives. Our theme, “Theatre and Performance in African/Caribbean Cultures of Democracy,” is concerned with that which links ideas and practices of democracy to the cultural domain of human life, i.e., to the matrices of human interaction in which signifying (especially, creative-expressive) practices inform and facilitate how people make, shape and understand the world around them. How, for instance, does theatre and performance (including the power relations and structures within theatre and performance making itself) replicate, reinvent, represent, reinforce, challenge or undermine democratic ideas and practice in African and Caribbean societies? We anticipate that proposed papers will explore theatre and performance in Africa and the Caribbean as key aspects of the cultural domain in which democracy is defined: as important sites where the scope and meanings of inclusion, marginalization, representation, access, political legitimacy, power, authority, control, censorship, freedom, voice, rights, etc. are contested, negotiated or consolidated within/against the frameworks of beliefs, values, traditions, customs, conventions, and/or protocols.

Please note:

Intending participants are invited to submit abstracts (maximum 250 words) for papers they wish to discuss at the 2015 IFTR conference in Hyderabad. Papers are welcome from within and across disciplines, including but not limited to Theatre and Performance Studies, Cultural Studies, and Anthropology. We welcome co-authored papers and collaborative presentations.

The abstract submission deadline is 31 January 2015. Abstracts can only be submitted through the abstract submission page at Cambridge Journals Online (http://journals.cambridge.org/iftr). You will have to be a current IFTR member or register in order to submit an abstract. The site will prompt you to join or renew your membership of IFTR. This has to be done by 31 January 2015otherwise your paper cannot be accepted for the conference.  For more information on this process, please visit: http://www.iftr2015hyd.in

The working group works by circulating papers in advance in order to make the most of the time and opportunity for discussion and engagement with those papers. Therefore, members whose abstracts are accepted will be required to submit their paper for circulation to members of the working group by 8 June 2015. This can be a work-in-progress (draft) version of the paper and must not exceed 4000 words.

Please forward this call for papers to colleagues who you think may be interested. Information about the working group can be found at http://www.firt-iftr.org/working-groups/theatre-and-cultural-studies/african-and-caribbean-theatre-and-performance

Conveners for the forthcoming meeting of the working group are:

·      David Donkor ([email protected]) Texas A&M University, Texas, U.S.A.

·      Ekua Ekumah-Asamoah ([email protected]) University of Ghana, Legon, Ghana

Announcement above received via email.