Diaspora and the Difference Race Makes

February 15th & 16th (click here for program)

Plangere Writing Center, Murray Hall-Room 302, College Avenue Campus

This conference explores the importance of racial difference in the African diaspora. Recent works in the fields of culture, language, geography, and social movements have opened the necessary space for thinking about difference as a central feature of the African diaspora, and as an opportunity for further exploration rather than a problem that one must solve. In the African diaspora, the process of racialization was central to and concomitant with dispersion, and this process entailed multiple racial formations among diasporic populations.

In places like Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Lusophone Africa, South Africa, and Europe, the diverse processes of racialization of large segments of populations descended from Africans and the characterization of these communities as something other than "black" highlights this racial difference in the diaspora, and calls into question the assumption of correspondence between African diaspora and blackness.

Attention to intra-diasporic racial difference therefore opens new inquiry into diaspora as a transnational social formation by focusing on the inability of race to translate easily across historical and national contexts.

"Black Atlantic: Diaspora and the Difference Race Makes"
PROGRAM

When: Thursday, February 15th & Friday, February 16th
Time: Feb. 15th, 8:45 am - 5:45 pm; Feb. 16th, 9:00 am -1:00 pm
Place: Murray Hall, Room 302, Plangere Writing Center, CAC

Thursday, February 15th, 2007

8:45 am: Welcome and Introduction

9:00 am—11:30 am: Session I

Charles Mills (Philosophy, University of Illinois at Chicago), “Better
Dread (If Still Dead) Than Red: Radical High-Browns in Jamaican Political
Fiction, 1955-2003”

Frank Guridy (History, University of Texas), “Feeling Diaspora in Harlem
and Havana”

Discussant: Carter Mathes, English, Rutgers University

11:30 am—1:00 pm: Catered Lunch

1:15 pm—2:45 pm: Session II

Jemima Pierre (Anthropology, University of Texas), “Touring Racial
Heritage? Ghanaians, African-Americans, and Diasporic Identity Formation”

Discussant: Abena Busia, English, Rutgers University

3:15 pm—5:45 pm: Session III

Tina Campt (History, Duke University), “Family Matters: Race, Gender and
Belonging in Black German Photography”

Jacqueline Nassy Brown (Anthropology, Hunter College), “The Racial State
of the Everyday and the Making of a National Geography of Britain”

Discussant: Kim Butler, Africana Studies & History, Rutgers University

Friday, February 16th, 2007

9:00 am—11:30 am: Session IV

Adrian Burgos, Jr. (History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign),
“Left Out: Afro-Latinos , Black Baseball’s Internationalism and the
Revision of the History of Jim Crow Baseball”

Donna Murch (History, Rutgers University), “The Black Panther and Internal
Diaspora: Rethinking the Role of Race and Black Power in the BPP,
1966-1981”

Discussant: Carlos Decena, Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies & Women’s
and Gender Studies, Rutgers University

12:00 pm—1:00 pm: Catered Lunch & Closing Address

Barnor Hesse (African American Studies, Political Science & Sociology,
Northwestern University), “Con/Fused Horizons: Black Atlantic and/or
African Diaspora?”

Papers are available on request for those attending sessions.
Please email rcha@rci.rutgers.edu or call (732)932-8701 for further
information.

Co-Sponsored by the Center for Race and Ethnicity
Organized by Professors Minkah Makalani and Mia Bay, Rutgers Department of History