3rd Annual Recovering Black Women's Voices and Lives Symposium
Transnational Feminisms and Women in the African Diaspora
October 20, 2011
Sponsored by the Department of Gender and Race Studies
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama
Deadline for Proposal Submission: June 10, 2011
The Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama
invites submissions for the 3rd Annual Recovering Black Women's Voices and
Lives Symposium on this year's topic: Transnational Feminisms and Women in
the African Diaspora. The Recovering Black Women's Voices and Lives
Symposium aims to highlight the significant, groundbreaking and central
contributions of African American and Afro-Descendent women to literary
studies, intellectual history, feminist thought and theory, and cultural
production by engaging the work of scholars and activists nationally and
internationally. The event will be held October 20, 2011 at the University
of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Transnational feminisms work to decolonize the contested terrain of
knowledge production upon which the lives, histories, and subjectivities
of Black women in the African Diaspora are constituted and reconstituted
within global relations of power. We welcome papers that explore the
particular intersections, realities, and contradictions of colonialisms,
recolonizations, and cultural imperialisms as they manifest in the daily
lives of Black women in a variety of geographical contexts. Of particular
interest are the ways in which transnational feminist theories are put
into practice by scholars, public intellectuals, practitioners, and
activists on the ground. Some overarching questions we seek to explore in
this year's symposium include the following: How are Black women's
subjectivities being constituted, disrupted, claimed, and consumed both
discursively and materially through the consolidation of global capitalism
in national, regional, and local contexts? How do Black women embody,
perform, and negotiate an array of mobilities and immobilizations, of
uprootings and regroundings, of border crossings and inspections, within
historically entrenched geopolitical terrains. What are the local
sociohistorical particularities that shape their agency, identities,
livelihoods, social networks, political engagement, and activism? And
finally, what are the politics of transnational feminist and anti-racist
solidarities across difference, particularly those in tension and
contention with the foci and priorities of dominant Western feminisms both
within and outside the academy?
We invite proposals for papers or panels from a variety of perspectives,
disciplines and fields on topics including but not limited to:
• The Politics of Citizenship (legal, social, cultural, affective)
• Historiographies of Feminism and Global Capitalism
• Transnational (Counter) Topographies, Borders/Borderlands, and
(Im)Mobilities
• Narratives of Identity, "Home", Belonging
• Speaking across Feminist Borders and Solidarities
• Knowledge Production, Decolonization, and Western Feminisms
• NGOs, Development, Human Rights, Local-Global Activism
• Feminization/Racialization of Poverty, Labor, and Migration
• Multiculturalism and Transnational Feminism
• Literary, Visual, Popular Culture, Mass Media Representation
For individual papers please submit a 250 word abstract and a CV of no
more than 2 pages. Abstracts should include a phone number and email
address. For panel presentations, please submit a panel abstract of 450
words or less, along with the names and paper titles of each presenter,
contact information [phone and email] for the primary contact person, and
a CV of no more than 2 pages for each presenter. Proposals are welcome
from academics, community activists, graduate students and undergraduate
students. Panels should include 3-4 presenters. We will provide moderators
for each panel session. Please send proposals and queries to Dr. Jennifer
Shoaff at jshoaff@as.ua.edu by June 10, 2011. Call 205-348-7048 for more
information.
