What Is This “Black” in Global Black Literatures?
Virtual Session
Description
Following Stuart Hall’s provocation in his classic 1992 essay, “What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?,” this panel begins with its own “conjectural” moment as it seeks to explore “Global Black Literatures,” broadly conceived, as a field of study, theoretical concept, and set of intellectual, philosophical, and cultural practices and productions. What do we mean when we teach and study under the rubric of “Global Black Literatures,” and how might we construe meaning from each of the critical terms, taken together and considered separately: The global? Black? Literatures? What are the possibilities and limitations, inclusions, exclusions, elisions, contradictions, complexities, tensions, and controversies of Black literary studies framed around the idea of the global? In Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective (2022), Lorgia García Peña acknowledges “the imperfections of translating racial meaning and racial politics across languages, cultures, and geographies” when using terminology to convey “the ethnic, cultural, and racial experiences of people across geographies and times” (ix). “To be recognized in the diaspora, then,” Peña argues, “Black migrants and their descendants—be they Black Latinxs or AfroItalians—must translate their blackness through ‘better’ blackness: the cultural, political, sociological, academic, popular, and historical language of hegemonic US blackness,” an outgrowth of US imperialism (196). Biodun Jeyifo in his introduction to Africa in the World & The World in Africa: Essay in Honor of Abiola Irele (2011) argues that there has been a “deep and pervasive” collapse of “an overarching paradigm of race consciousness and Pan Africanism” and the idea of the “African Personality,” on the one hand, and a “paradigm lost” of the “totalizing and universalistic” discourse of Senghor and Césaire within the Francophone tradition on the other hand (x-xi). To the extent that we might consider Global Black Literatures as a study of the African presence in the literary world, what does this conceptualization offer us? How might we grapple with the emergence of linguistic, cultural, and geographic hegemonies within this global Black study? As Carole Boyce-Davies articulates in Moving Beyond Boundaries: Black Women’s Diasporas (1995), when we study “Black women’s writing” as a category, for example, “we are in fact dealing with the world and with a long history” (13). What, then, does the category of “Global Black Literatures” afford us as we set out to engage, as Boyce-Davies puts it, “in the process of re-creating our worlds” and imagining new futures (13)?
Scholars are invited to submit abstracts for papers that address: Black aesthetics, translation, relationship to, around, and across Africa and the diaspora, exile, migration, borders, the oceanic, the African world, media, ecocriticism, Black/African feminism, womanism, hegemonies, Black liberation, and more.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Joseph Shafer is a Lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Marburg. He specializes in aesthetics, modern & contemporary poetry, American studies, and critical theory. Since receiving his PhD in 2018, he has been awarded fellowships at Dartmouth College, Oxford University's Rothermere American Institute, Auburn University, and the Government of Ireland Research Council. Publications on a range of 20th and 21st-century American poets have appeared in journals such as Arizona Quarterly, Textual Practice, Journal of American Studies, and in edited collections, with pieces on 'the black aesthetic,' as well as black poets and painters like Steve Jonas, Claudia Rankine, and Stanley Whitney. Other essays on French theory and aesthetics (on Lacan, Derrida, Badiou, Rancière, et al) have appeared in journals and edited collections as well, and his conversation with Rancière, from 2017-2021, was published in SubStance. Shafer is also the editor of The Assorted Prose of Barbara Guest, coeditor of The Selected Poems of Barbara Guest (both with Wesleyan University Press), and has published the monograph, Appearing beside Text: Uprisings of Indifference in Post-1945 American Poetry.
Speaker Bio
Brenda Tan is a second-year PhD student in the English Department at Rice University. She studies Third-World Marxism, peripheral modernism, postcolonial literature, and critical race theory.
Speaker Bio
Rebecca Amonor is pursuing a PhD in English at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is a Lynn Harvey Cooper Fellow in American Culture Studies and McDonnell Academy Scholar. She graduated with honors in English and African American Studies from Yale, where she was a Mellon Mays fellow. Her research focuses on twenty-first-century literature by children of African immigrants in America, exploring themes in African Diasporic, African, African American, and immigrant literature.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Hapsatou Wane is an Associate Professor of English at Georgia Southern University
Papers
Speaker Bio
Jude Chudi Okpala is professor of instruction in the Department of Philosophy, Classics, and Humanities, University of Texas at San Antonio, Texas.
Speaker Bio
Raquel Kennon is Associate Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on the literary and cultural legacies of slavery in the Americas, memory, and artistic, political, and poetic intimacies across the diaspora. She is the author of Afrodiasporic Forms.
Speaker Bio
Marshall L. Smith, PhD is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies and Black Studies at Swarthmore College. Smith’s teaching/research includes literatures of the Plantation Americas with a focus on the Francophone Afro-Caribbean. His current monograph in progress, Nelumbo lutea: Reassembling Cultural Memory in the Extended circum-Carib(being), fills in the cultural breaks of (non)history for African-descended persons in the post-plantation Americas through the expressive arts.
Speaker Bio
Tolulope Akinwole is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.