The Black Humanities Collective:
Reading the Past, Writing the Future
News: Click here for information on the 2008 Black Humanities Collective Conference
The Black Humanities Collective is an interdisciplinary graduate student and faculty organization at the University of Michigan dedicated to the qualitative study of Africa and its diaspora.
Mission : In the interest of affirming and improving the University's commitment to excellence in the humanities, we have founded the Black Humanities Collective, an interdisciplinary organization dedicated to the intellectual and professional development of persons at the University of Michigan studying Africa and its diaspora. We see this collective as an avenue through which developing scholars can establish and nurture relationships across fields, sub fields, and respective years of graduate and post-graduate training. Such relationships, we believe, provide the intellectual foundation necessary for creative and innovative work in the humanities and will grant participants a forum within which to craft their professional skills and claim greater mastery over the constellation of factors that constitute an academic career.
At monthly meetings, the Black Humanities Collective addresses questions of fellowship preparation, invites seasoned instructors to speak on the politics of teaching black subject matter, and seeks to tap into the experiences of Michigan Alumni currently pursuing careers in the humanities. Through these meetings, the collective also keeps its members abreast of activities pertinent to their professional development, and members will use the collective as an intellectual sounding board for presenting conference papers, practicing job talks, and submitting other works in progress for the purpose of peer review.
Lastly, the Black Humanities Collective stands on the principles of peer mentoring, for even in a profession that rewards the fruits of private contemplation and solitude, informal peer mentoring often provides the
safest and most consistent space for testing ideas, developing one's voice, and maturing as a scholar. We gather in the interests of these principles in an effort to nurture collegiality and we work with the intention of pushing forward our respective disciplines.Bodies in Motion: Diaspora, Difference & Discursive Performances March 27-28, 2008
RegistrationSponsored by the Black Humanities Collective in conjunction with the Center for Afroamerican & African Studies at theUniversity of Michigan
with guest performance by professor and performing artist, E. Patrick Johnson, author of Appropriating Blackness (Duke University Press, 2003), co-editor of Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (Duke, 2005), and author of the forthcoming Sweet Tea: An Oral History of Black Gay Men of the South (University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
The recent turn in interdisciplinary scholarship towards “diaspora in all directions” has implications for scholars in all fields working on theory, criticism, and research on Africa and the African diaspora. African and African American bodies are far from static in the multiple and changing contexts in which they move, as they internally and externally align and fracture by nation, class, gender, sexuality, language, and other categories of identity. Difference marks and/or blurs the boundaries of black bodies as individuals in local spaces and as communities across the diaspora -- a diaspora where the Atlantic is one site amidst the global migrations of Africans and African Americans.
Our conference seeks to explore the complexities and diversity of black bodies in motion across time, space, and identities. We contend that diaspora is an embodied social phenomenon; moreover, the bodies in question are not static, but in motion across many different contexts.
We invite abstracts for 15-minute presentations that interrogate the ways bodies engage with and perform diaspora and difference, and how this is subject to both time and place. Moreover, we welcome graduate student work and interdisciplinary research on black bodies in all fields of the humanities, social sciences, and hard sciences.
Topics for abstracts, proposals, posters, and performances include, but are not limited to: gender & sexuality, trauma studies, religion, performance theory, intersection of scientific & humanistic discourses on the body, economics of the body; commodification of human bodies, bodies in contention, lifeless bodies, the body politic, embodied politics, the relationship between technology and the body, translating bodies, oral histories, education, social work & community activism, languages & literatures, transatlantic crossings of diasporic bodies, culture and performance.
The Black Humanities Collective is an interdisciplinary graduate student and faculty organization at the University of Michigan dedicated to the intellectual and professional development of those studying Africa and its diaspora. For this reason, graduate students are especially encouraged to submit their works-in-progress. Please send 200-250 word abstracts via email to BHCConference@umich.edu. Abstracts and proposals are due on Thursday, January 10, 2008 by midnight E.S.T. Acceptance notifications will be emailed by January 31, 2008. Email questions to Rachel Quinn or Shanesha Brooks Tatum, Conference Co-Chairs.
Kevin Gaines, Director
University of Michigan Center for Afroamerican and African Studies
505 S. State St.| 4700 Haven | Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1045 | (734) 764-5513
| Fax (734)763-0543
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