What Is This “Black” in Global Black Literatures?

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.