Seventh International CAAR Conference

BLACKNESS AND MODERNITIES

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, MADRID

THE COLLEGIUM FOR AFRICAN AMERICAN RESEARCH

April 18 to 21, 2007

CALL FOR PAPERS

CAAR 2007 calls for papers and workshops which address Blackness and Modernities. The African American Experience of the Modern World can be dated to 1500, to 1776, to 1865, to 1920, to 1965, to 2000? The experience is multiple, the people many, and the modern manifold. We speak of modernities because we do not want to define and dictate meaning; we want the conference to do the defining and any dictating to come from the power of the speakers. We want to consider ways in which peoples origined in Africa and living in the Americas have created as well as come to terms with modernism. We will be meeting in Spain, and, as always, we will want to pay attention to location and geography. Spain led the European encounter with the Americas and pioneered the modern engagements with extermination and enslavement. Spain has also been the host and the subject of many African American thinkers, writers and artists.

The focus of CAAR on the Atlantic interchange leads us to emphasize the links between disciplines like African American Studies, Caribbean Studies, and African Studies. Interconnections must be recognized. African Americans are the best-studied ethnic minority in the world, and the theoretical and empirical understanding gained from this research is relevant to ethnic and racial issues everywhere.

Madrid offers the following themes for papers and workshops:

MODERNITIES OF THE SPIRIT

THE MODERN–PROGRESSIVE, FASCIST, TOTALITARIAN, LIBERATING?

MODERNISM AND AFRICAN AMERICAN ART, LITERATURE, MUSIC

MODERN BLACK ECONOMIES AND GLOBALIZATION

THE MODERN BLACK BODY

NEW WORLDS, MODERN WORLDS

As in the previous CAAR conferences, the program committee welcomes papers that approach African American Research from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective. Workshops should have no more than eight slots. Since CAAR encourages international cooperation, we would ask that workshop organizers either recruit some of the participants from countries other than their own or leave at least half of the slots open. Proposals should be as short and to the point as possible (no more than one page). All proposals should include title of paper/workshop, a brief abstract, and should include your name, postal address and email address. Send proposals by email (with the text of the proposal included in the email, NOT as an attachment).

The deadline for workshop proposals is 1 June 2006 and for paper proposals is 1 September 2006. Please send them to the President of CAAR, Christopher Mulvey, <christopher.mulvey@winchester.ac.uk>.