Appel à com : "Black states of desire : dispossession, circulation, transformation"

[Madeleine L.]

9th International Conference of the Collegium for African American Research

Paris, April 06-09, 2011

Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7


Call for Papers


Black States of Desire: Dispossession, Circulation, Transformation



" If we – and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively
conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness
of the others – do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we
are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the
history of the world. " (James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 1963)

" a call to action, a call to consciousness. " (Assotto Saint, Spells of Voodoo
Doll, 1996)



Bridging the 2009 Conference in Bremen on black epistemologies and struggles,
and the 2013 Conference in Atlanta, the 9th International Conference of the
Collegium for African American Research will be held in Paris in 2011. Placing
the emphasis on the conditions of social transformation in the black world, it
will articulate two main axes of analysis and reflection: the intersection of a
socioeconomic approach with a multicultural and identity-focused perspective;
the relation between theorizing processes and material transformation, between
intellectual activity and political action, and between different communities
with specific agendas.


The conference will highlight the recognition of the central historical
contribution of black feminist studies and movements, notably lesbian, in the
American and South African contexts. In both their sought after inclusiveness
and productive failures they are exemplary of individual change and collective
reformation. This goal, once pursued by Audre Lorde and James Baldwin, and still
to be reached, is here emblematized by the figures of desire and the black
states. In the wake of Lorde's esthetical and political alliance of the self and
the community, of Baldwin's desiring consciousness and ethics of inclusion,
desire and the black states are together rich with conscious revolutions to
come. They work as immaterial and physical orientations, symbols of shifting
identifications, of the diversity of black lived experiences. The black states
of desire therefore set out to describe lack turned into impetus and
actualization, the movement from what exists to what can be imagined and
created, from words to the building stone, from statement to establishment.



In this broad perspective, we invite proposals from scholars in any discipline,
but also from intellectual, artistic and cultural conversants, and
socioeconomic, political, and institutional actors who aim at anchoring Black
studies and creations in a social world to be concretely changed with innovative
projects. Without being limited, either in number, scope, nor aims, the desired
states of being black that the conference hopes to sketch will be related to the
key notions of dispossession, circulation, and transformation. Cardinal poles of
the worldwide black experience, they also open up the space for mapping and
materializing the much-needed black utopias of the 21st century.


Black islands and alternatives to isolation may be one such. Instrumental in
slavery, colonization, and in the shaping of modernity, with its long-ingrained
racism, isolation has taken many forms including political subjugation,
socioeconomic subordination and de-historicization, as the media coverage of the
recent Haitian earthquake has shown. It has overshadowed that Saint-Domingue
turned Haiti was the first black republic whose social transformation was spread
throughout the worldwide 20th century anti-colonial movements of national
liberation, especially African. The sister islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique
may represent the Haitian utopia passed on to the black 21st century. This is
what seems to prove the February 2009 Martiniquan Manifest, which, among others,
Patrick Chamoiseau and Edouard Glissant signed in the heat of the Guadeloupean
collective mobilization. Its key word, poetical and political, is Lyannaj, which
signifies in Creole dynamic and praxis linking individuals, peoples,
communities. This urgent need of linkage has also always been carried through
the African American text ― from Zora Neale Hurston's polyphonic voices to
Toni Morrison's re-membered selves and others, from Richard Wright's political
commitments to Melvin Dixon's instruments of love.


In opposition to the further dispossession of the dispossessed, and in order to
generate a worldwide community based on solidarity, the circulation of black
experiences, past and present, is thus of paramount importance. It also needs to
include other islanders, unacknowledged or vanishing, such as Blacks of and in
Europe, gays and lesbians in Africa or persons with AIDS, whose fundamental
rights are denied. Cut off from the wealth and health of the North, they all
call out for justice and, from their specific situations and conditions, for a
profound reflection on communities ― be they inherited or elective: how do
they culturally intersect? How can they be politically articulated? To reach the
necessary coalition-building between black communities, it is necessary to
consider the multiple identifications and identities that found them, and the
cross-cutting issues that impact them. While revisiting the African American
literary esthetics of optics, through which things unseen are made evident,
contemporary writers and artists, often activists as well, such as Essex
Hemphill, Assotto Saint, or Sapphire, have complied with this double agenda.
Their commitment to both art and the world prolongs the organic bond between
literature and sociopolitical struggles, while eschewing academic aporias,
conceptualizations disconnected from black reality, or, up until recently, the
delusions promised by the proclaimed advent of, in the United States, the
postrace, and in South Africa, the postcolony.


That is the task of all, and particularly of scholars and actors in the
Humanities. If reconnected to the social world, starting with a productive
connection between disciplines, to which CAAR has been dedicated since its
creation, the call for transformation from worldwide black philosophies, arts
and literatures may not remain unanswered. In the spirit of the Black Writers
Conference, some fifty years earlier, the 2011 Paris Conference "Black States of
Desire: Dispossession, Circulation, Transformation" hopes to offer such a
reuniting space.


Abstracts should be sent to the principal organizer of the conference at:
jprocchi@wanadoo.fr


The deadline for paper proposals is 5 September 2010. Presenters are expected to
pay conference fees and membership to the Collegium for African American
Research. More information can be found at: http://caar-web.org