CFP: The Black Atlantic Revisited: Culture, Conjuncture and Conviviality
ACLA 2014, March 20-23, New York University
Submission Deadline EXTENDED: November 15th
SEMINAR ORGANIZERS: Jay Garcia (New York University), Tavia Nyong’o (New York University)
This seminar invites retrospective assessment and further considerations of the field of intellectual and creative endeavor opened up by Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary. The anniversary of the book coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, the setting for Gilroy’s earliest interventions. The seminar invites projects that explore the past, present and future of black British cultural studies as epitomized in The Black Atlantic and subsequent works that have broached such themes as conviviality, militarism, postcolonial melancholia, and planetary humanism. How might contemporary black cultural studies continue to develop its theoretical fluency and transnational optic? What is the ongoing critical purchase of Cultural Studies in literary and cultural analysis “after” the cultural turn?
Topics may include:
The Black Atlantic and postcolonial studies
Black popular and expressive cultures
Comparative literary studies and the legacy of Cultural Studies
Black trans-Atlantic, planetary thinking and the Anthropocene
The Black Atlantic and translation
Black Pacific, oceanic and archipelogic epistemologies
Human rights, humanitarianism, and humanitarian intervention
Conviviality, biopolitics, and anti-imperialism
Reception of The Black Atlantic
The Black Atlantic and Said’s Orientalism in comparative perspective
SEMINAR KEYWORDS: Black Atlantic, Cultural Studies, modernism,
translation, humanism, ecology, biopolitics, Paul Gilroy,
conviviality, culture
