“The Black Atlantic: Colonial and Contemporary Exchanges”
October 28-29, 2011
Stanford Humanities Center

Friday, Oct. 28

Registration 2:00-2:30pm

Opening Keynote (Bruce Hall, Duke University) 2:30-3:45pm

Panel I 4:00-5:30pm
Trading Race: Colonial and Contemporary perceptions of Race
Panelists:

1. Dana Linda (UCLA) White Noise, Black Masks: Recapturing Race in Hispanic Caribbean Prison Narratives

2. Michael Ugorji (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Germany) Being Black in a Post-slavery, Post-Darwinian World: The Persistence of Victimage

3. Sarah Quesada (Stanford University) García Márquez, and the Daughters of the Diaspora in a Selected Corpus.

4. Fatoumata Seck (Stanford University)  Bouqui and Malice, a Caribbean counter-poetics

Panel II 5:45-7:15pm
The Diaspora in Circulation: The Aesthetic Politics of Cultural Production
Panelists:

1. Krishna Barua (Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati)  Inventing the Truth: Maya Angelou’s ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’

2. I. Augustus Durham (Princeton Theological Seminary)  The (In)Visibility of a Frenzied Reality: W. E. B. Du Bois’ as Conjure Man in ‘The Souls of Black Folk’

3. Joy White (University of Greenwich)   From Rhythm and Blues to Grime: Black Atlantic Exchanges and the Performance of Identity

4. Robert Hanserd (Northern Illinois University) Obayifo to Obeah: Priestly Power and other elements of  Afro-Atlantic Akan Identity
Appetizers, wine, mingling and music 7:30-8:30pm

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Saturday, Oct. 29
Breakfast 7:45-8:15am

Panel III 8:15-9:45am Crossing the Space in Between: representations and belonging in Ghana, Haiti, Senegal and Somalia
Panelists:

1. Michael Ralph (New York University) Forensics of Debt: Militarism and Modern Credit Debt in the French Atlantic Empire

2. Scott Stabler (Grand Valley State University) and Mary Owusu University of Cape Coast, Ghana) Global Slavery: Lost in Trans-lation

3. Marwa H. Ghazali (University of Kansas) Is My Baby Too Black: slavery, silence and self-imagination among Somali Bantu refugees in Kansas City

4. Christine Mobley (Duke University) Central Africans in the Haitian Revolution

Panel IV 10:00–11:30am  Colonial Constructions of Race
Panelists:

1. Nicholas Jones (New York University) Let’s Play a Game of Chess! Situating the Presence of Race, Slavery, and the Horizontal Migratory Movement of a Mulata Slave in Lope de Vega’s Servir a señor discreto.

2. Myriam Chancy (University of Cincinnati)  Return to My Native Land ?: Investigating the Discursive Landscape of African Pilgrimages in Contemporary Postcolonial Travel Narratives  

3. Elizabeth Spragins (Stanford University) Grey Shades of Blackness in Zurara’s Cronica da Guine

4. Marzia Milazzo (University of California, Santa Barbara) ‘Capturing the Black Experience in Latin America’?: Diasporic Identity and Anti-Racist Discourse in the Works of the Afro-Panamanian Writer Cubena

Faculty Roundtable 11:45-1pm
Faculty:
1. Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi (Stanford University, French and Comparative Literature)
2. Lisa Surwillo (Stanford University, Iberian and Latin American Cultures)
3. Richard Roberts (Stanford University, History)

Keynote lunch by Pius Adesanmi 1-2pm

Sponsors:

Center for African Studies, The Humanities Center, The Division for Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, The Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, Department of Anthropology, Department of History, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Department of English, and the Department of Sociology.

This is an interdisciplinary conference,  and all are welcome to attend!

For more information please contact Melina Platas at mplatas [at] stanford [dot] edu.