Illegibility and Aesthetic Form in the African Diasporas of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans

This seminar invites submissions that explore intentional illegibilites deployed in literary and visual forms in the African diasporas of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Despite their intertwined histories of slavery and colonialism, these regions have typically been understood as hermetically sealed off from one another in the humanities. The fields of literary studies and visual culture, however, illustrate how racialized subjects across these aqueous geographies have relied on shared strategies of opacity and obfuscation, leveraging forms such as the photograph and the novel whose histories and development were imbricated in colonial processes. Through this seminar, we intend to bring these interconnected, albeit scholarly disparate, sites in conversation with one another, all while attending to their particular historicities. Pushing against regionally-bounded conceptions of the fields of literary studies and  visual culture, we seek to explore the resonances between strategies of illegibility throughout the African diaspora, and their capacity to expand political and cultural imaginations. We invite proposals from both Atlantic or Indian Ocean studies, and are especially enthusiastic about work that explicitly connects both realms. We also welcome submissions that explore the following themes and topics:

Postcolonial theory
Black Studies
Caribbean Studies
Opacity
Fugitivity
Slavery and indenture
Global black feminisms and queer studies
Non-linearity & rhizomatic approaches
Oceanic/maritime/archipelagic/aqueous methods