> > REVISIONING BLACKNESS: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY GRADUATE
> > STUDENT CONFERENCE
> >
> > On November 9, 2001, The Center for the Study of Black Literature
> > and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania will host a conference
> > for graduate students enrolled in schools in the Philadelphia
> > area whose work centrally investigates representations and analyses
> > of black people of the African diaspora. We are especially interested in
> > encouraging the participation of emerging scholars whose work, while
> > grounded in a traditional discipline (for example, literature, art
> > history, sociology, folklore, music, film, education, and political
> > sciences), has clear implications for research in a variety of fields.
> > The conference, which will feature three panels whose
> > parameters are described below, keynote presentations by established
> > scholars whose work is interdisciplinary in nature, and ample opportunity
> > for extended, lively discussions of the panelists' formulations, will
> > offer an unusual -- and hopefully welcome -- opportunity for extended
> > conversations about the possibilities, problems, and future directions in
> > artistic, scholarly, and mass media representations of blackness.
> >
> >
> > *** Please submit abstracts of no more than one page to
> Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture
> 3808 Walnut St.
> Philadelphia, PA 19104
> fax # 215-898-0765
> to either Aquanda Washington
> (aboone@dept.english.upenn.edu) or
> Amina Gautier (agautier@dept.english.upenn.edu)
> For futher questions or more information please call 215 898-5141
> Please be sure to indicate the panel(s) to which you are submitting your
> abstract.
> *** Abstracts must be received by October 9, 2001 ***
This conference is free and open to the public. Refreshments will
be provided for presenters.
>
>
> > GENDER AND FAMILY
> >
> > This panel will feature papers that discuss the
> > constitution of gender roles and family structures in light of emerging
> > challenges to traditional notions of manhood, womanhood, and the nuclear
> > family. In particular, the papers should address the practices
and representations of gender, sexuality, masculinity,
> > femininity, childrearing, and/or parenthood as they are demonstrated
> > in artistic texts, through quantitative and qualitative analysis, and
in other modes of investigation by and/or about blacks in areas of the
> > diaspora.
> >
> > Representin':
> >
> > Traditional historical, literary, and scientific narratives about
> > people of the African diaspora have always reflected a desire to
> > emphasize black visual difference, signalling, among other things, a
> > specific quality of looked-at-ness that blackness has been seen as
> > manifesting for dominant cultures. From the perverse spectacles of
> > minstrel plays and lynching to (more recently) the reification of
> > reification of black athletes and the mass media linking of blackness and
> > welfare, urban poverty, and crime, black bodies have functioned as
essential otherness for mainstream societies, whose hegemony over the
form and content of such representation has been contested by blacks
across the diaspora. For this panel, we invite papers that investigate
the forms, terms, and implications of the looked-at or scopic
dimensions of blackness in the visual arts (painting, sculpture,
photography), in the mass media (newspapers, television, and film) and
in modes of artistic discursive representation (literature, song
lyrics, etc). We are interested both in mainstream formulations and
in black contestatory responses to these formulations.
> >
> > IMPLICATIONS OF HISTORY
> >
> > This panel will explore a variety of ways in which blacks of the African
> > diaspora have written themselves into history. In particular, we invite
> > papers that investigate the uses writers, filmmakers, songwriters,
> > scholars, and other black intellectuals make of transformative historical
> > events (Civil Rights movements in the United States and abroad; African
> > independence movements) or the periods of great black suffering that
> > precede these empancipatory moments (for example, African colonialism and
> > American and West Indian slavery). If, as contemporary theorists
> > of history suggest, narrative formulations of the past must be seen as
> > laden with the ideological biases of their inventors, and if, as Toni
> > Morrison's narrator claims in BELOVED, history belongs the definers, not
> > the defined, how might we understand postcolonial, post-Emancipation,
> > and post-Civil Rights black diasporic engagements of the past in film,
> > literature, music, film, scholarship, and other intellectual realms?
> >
> >
===============================================
From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
CFP@english.upenn.edu
Full Information at
http://www.english.upenn.edu/CFP/
or write Erika Lin: elin@english.upenn.edu
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