CFP Deadline: 15 June 2019

The Editors of African and Black Diaspora announce a Call for Papers on Black Intellectuals and the Making of the Atlantic World for a special issue of African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal.

During the three decades between the end of World War I and 1950, Black intellectuals (from Africa, Caribbean, the United States), cultural workers, students, artists and political activists forged new conceptions of self beyond the confines of the colonial matrix and forged anti-colonial political and cultural organizations, as well as journals and newspapers, and created wider solidarity networks with progressive organizations and movements in the center of Empire. The new spaces they developed in London, Paris, Lisbon, Berlin etc. … increased the interactions among Black intellectuals in the colonial metropole which functioned as a site of anti-colonial resistance against racism and colonialism. In the process, Black intellectuals and artists, created a dynamic and transnational spaces in which “cultural exchange, production and belonging” (Gilroy 1993) were forged across space and time in the making of the modern Black Atlantic world. Indeed, Black intellectuals during the period and since used a wide variety of cultural productions, and artistic works as a form of language artfully interweaving theatrical, musical, and ritual performance as a rich continuum of cultural exchange that imaginatively reinvented, re-created, and restored the centrality of African diaspora in the making of the modern Black Atlantic world.

The Editors of African and Black Diaspora are seeking papers that examine the development of Black intellectual movements and the various political and cultural networks they developed in the colonial metropolis and how these networks were activated, nurtured to conveyed transnational dialogue among people of the African descent. In what ways have these networks both real and imagined become spaces of knowledge and memory? What cultural resources and political practices were deployed to “improvising new lives…, creating new possibilities … and decolonizing” the metropolis itself (Schwarz, 2003). What political discourse and cultural resources were developed to resist the colonial empire both at home and abroad?

Contributors are encouraged to explore Black intellectual political and cultural networks and sites in the colonial metropolis through literature, music, performance, visual art, religious congregations, carnivals and festivals, cultural clubs, dance halls and burial associations, etc.

We are seeking papers that address the contributions of Black intellectuals, cultural workers and political activists in the making of the Black Atlantic world. Papers that examine the broad intellectual engagements, political practices, creative cultural works in performative living traditions and connections over space and time, showing through myriad examples how intellectual and creative cultural work and performance in different sites of the colonial metropole provides critique of empire and a source of inspiration for diverse African diaspora populations in Africa, Caribbean and the United States.

Abstracts should be 400‐500 words in length. Authors should send their abstract attached as a Word document. Please be sure to include the following: full name, university affiliation and contact information to diasporajournal@depaul.edu.

Deadlines: Submission of Abstracts, June 15, 2019.
Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by August 15, 2019.
Final paper due September 30, 2019.

Above text adapted from webpage.