Dear CAAR members, friends and colleagues

Welcome to our new home: you have reached the recently launched interactive website of the Collegium! I am happy to present this new site as a prospective forum of information and debate.

Please explore the site and its features to find out how you can submit information about your own publications, send in announcements of pertinent information for CAAR (like calls for papers, conference programs, or reports of interesting events), contribute to the intellectual life of CAAR with reviews of pertinent titles for transnational African-American and Black Studies, venture to write an editorial…

My first editorial includes three points.

First, I can happily report about our very well attended international conference Black Knowledges, Black Struggles in Transnational Perspective, March 2009 at Bremen University, Germany. (see www.caar2009.eu for exact program…)With over 250 participants and 25 number of workshops, an art forum with exhibitions, performances and artists’ lectures, as well as a dance evening, the conference offered lively and impressive insights into state-of-the art transnational research and creative endeavors in our field.

Keynote speakers Orlando Patterson, Kimberly Phillips, Alan Rice, Brycchan Carey, Lubaina Himid and Sylvia Wynter spoke to a wide ranging panorama of theoretical and  cultural-political issues concerning the challenges of black knowleges for the globalized world, and the importance of black struggles for the fight for human rights on a global scale.

We are proud to announce that a series of essays from the conference, addressing crucially the epistemological challenge of Black Studies to (post)Enlightenment societies and academia, will be published by Jason Ambroise and Sabine Broeck in the FORECAAST series.

The FORECAAST editorial board will of course happily further receive propositions for manuscripts, put together from other workshops of the conference, or around issues selected by CAAR members and friends.

Second, the CAAR election process this past summer has given us a new, and partly recomposed Board of Directors:

President: Sabine Broeck
Secretary: Cynthia Hamilton
Treasurer: Silvia Castro Borrego

Further board members:

Mar Gallego (University of Huelva, Spain),
Isabel Soto (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Spain),
Violet Johnson (Agnes Scott, USA),
Jean-Paul Rochhi (University of Paris-Diderot, France),
Magdalena Zaborowska (University of Michigan, USA)

It is my grateful and pleasant duty to thank the retired board members, Hanna Wallinger, Claude Julien, and Jürgen Heinrichs for their enduring contributions, their creativity and the resourcefulness they put into the collaboration with and for CAAR. Also, of course: Welcome to the new board members, CAAR is very much looking forward to the cooperation!

Third: with pleasure we can announce today that the next international conference of CAAR. titled "Black States of Desire: Dispossession, Circulation, Transformation", will be held under the aegis of Professor Jean Paul Rocchi in Paris, in the spring of 2011. Please stay tuned to this site to be informed about the call for papers, and the progress of conference planning. If you have any — academic or artistic – suggestions for contributions at this point already, please do not hesitate to submit to me, or to Jean Paul Rocchi.

Thank you for your attention, and enjoy the new site!

Sabine Broeck