BlackantiquaLit and Reading African American Cultural Expression
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Organization: Jorge Serrano
At times within African American cultural expressive literary forms there were many artists, writers, and thinkers who wrote about and voiced various conceptions of connectivity to what is being construed here as the correlated ancestral self-past. BlackantiquaLit as a concept is used to cover, gather, and interpret varying lineal renderings, (re)linkages, or heritage sensibilities, i.e., thoughts that capture a present alongside a formulated past with diasporicness and intended influences. The proposed compilation seeks to assemble and select submissions throughout several genres that comprise various considerations noted as ancestral reception and that disclose embedded antiquities in text and their functional meanings.
This compendium will include multiple fields of study that embrace wide viewpoints of how antiquity has been construed and engaged. It is noted that the use of emplotting Black antiquity stretches across numerous areas, i.e., spaces that encompass expressed ancestral inferences such as in literary, historical, artistic, musical, visual, performative forms and as tied cultural idioms. Such practices require studies that explicate and that can be seen as being reflected of the various ways writers and artists alike both admiringly or reprehensibly have encapsulated ties to a Black pre and post 1619 continuity and such cultural representative manifestations infused in text identify grouping of people construed as having derivation and/or survival. Interpreted works in this collection investigate emplotted written works as ancient people binding that involve belief of history, land, place, or event, and that exhibit unionism as a means for positive outcomes. Also encouraged are readings that serve to contend with pejorative allusions to a past and as impounded here offer literary and/or artistic vindication that resist circumscribed portrayals to specific projected indigeneity as for example a tabla rasa solipsism and or limited ancestral tracing as palimpsest that requires de-visioning.
The inclusivity of Black anteriority is importantly noted as it serves to imply to a reading audience held perceptions of the memorializable and the obtainable ideal of re(a)mending. It is hoped that anyone of the many characterizations of the grasped ancient studied and analyzed in this collection disclose an endeavoring toward Black ancestral understanding in a Cheikh Anta Diopian conceptual sense of the extended self and that has not easily been seen or espoused and that can be read in artistic and in literary realms. Blackness identified in its use of the ancient, i.e. BlackantiquaLit, is construed as a cultural nurturing cradle endeavoring that has molded and guided. BlackantiquaLit’s teleology then is to offer glimmers of perspectives about the past hidden in art and at times unseen although alluded to in text. This call for papers looks to bring together reviews from a variety of different areas, not only humanities but also social sciences.
Please note accepted abstracts will be included in a proposal to a university press for consideration. Please send your name, affiliation, and abstracts to serrano@udel.edu.
Jorge Serrano