Collegium for African American Research (CAAR)

CAAR MISSION

CAAR seeks to promote excellence in African American research

• to support joint activities in teaching in an international perspective

• to establish a form of visibility for younger scholars to promote interdisciplinary exchange among specialists in the various fields related to to African American studies.

• to support processes of cultural transformations, which enable the European scientific landscape to stay connected with and indebted to a knowledge of its imperial and colonial past and to secure, confirm and explore commitments to multicultural, antiracist epistemologies and academic practices.

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HISTORY AND PROGRESS

The Collegium for African American Research, known as CAAR, is a European based association of over 250 scholars from over 20 different countries.  CAAR was founded in 1992 to stimulate reearch in African American studies in Eruope by the creation of an international and interdisciplinary network. 

Various academic disciplines which deal with the development of modernity and postmodernity- historiography, literary studies and cultural studies most prominently among them- have recently re-examined their scientific approaches.

The new agenda has been:

• to multiethnic and multicultural diversities

• to repressed histories of diasporic experiences

• to the heritage of a history of slave trade and colinialism

in order to arrive at a more balanced picture of Western development as well as global interconnectedness.

CAAR, founded by a group of scholars heavily indebted to the the leading work of Black Studies in the United states, has taken up this challenge: it sees itself as a collected agent for the production and promotion of knowledge of the Black Diaspora, its interrelatedness with and its effects on our modern societies which have for the longest time been made invisible by disciplinary biases and ethnocentric disinterest.

Supporting and Affiliate Institutions

CAAR is a European-based association of more than 250 scholars from over 20 different countries.  CAAR collaborates with the W.E.B Du Bois Instititue for Afro-American Research of Harvard University.

CAAR collaborates with the Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies
http://www.mesea.org

CAAR also collaborates with MELUS (Multi Ethnic Literatures in the United States), ALARA (African Latin American Research Association) and various national African American Studies associations.