Emplotting Black Vindication as Literary Activist-Self (NeMLA)
Pennsylvania, PA
Organization: NeMLA
Event: NeMLA
Emplotting Black Vindication as Literary Activist-Self
This panel includes various African, African American and African diasporic writers who used literature, art, history, or social scientific writings to oppose faulty presentations of an inferior tertium quid, Du Boisian term, which refers to pejorative notions of subhuman capability. This panel welcomes review of writers and artists alike who endeavored through artistic, literary, historical, musical, filmic, or other means to contend with pseudo social scientific Untermensch –variant term for inferior designation. Writings and other media at various times and through varying genres and artistic forms, fashioned to make a case for full cultural and intellectual parity. The panel hopes to cover an evaluation of various writings and artistic cultural production that railed against negative conceptions of cultural, sexual, and/or human hierarchies and its Black maligning intent. The panel can include Afrocentric and hermeneutic readings that serve to garner from Black letters agentic cultural expressions and artistic practices as text that carry embedded varying ties or heritage or ancient identities as a Black past.
This call for papers seeks critiques and/or countering of slanted humanism and or social studies in multiple fields that reveal connections to a conceived contributory Black past as renarrative statements that invert ideas of inferiority and make visible erasure. Also, accepted will be reviews on works that reveal gems of positive Black episteme professed as a viable (en)revisioning, narratology and unpacking that attends to a tradition of contradictory demonstration and that propose (r)evolutionary insight of plotting, i.e., literary critic Paul Ricoeur's mimesis which use challenge disparaging narrative histories/events, but specifically centering manifestation of the Black literary activist-self through connective routes of time, place, and experience.
Review of works sought include and this is not exhaustive the socially literary, artistic production and positive (re)creation of Black anteriority continental and the diasporic. Again, various periods and genres are welcomed from eighteenth century writings, for example that may include Philis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, Maria Stewart, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison and others and including contemporary artists and their art work for example from artists like Aaron Douglas, Kara Walker, Fred Wilson, and others, or musical forms construed as Black antiquipop for example from such artists as Sun Ra, Chaka Khan, Michael Jackson, KRS One, Nas, Rhianna and others who brought back the Black ancient with allusions to past motifs and use (various Black past allusion) as received or imagined.
Description
This panel considers analyses from a broad range. Key aspects sought are examinations of artistic, literary, humanist, historical, filmic, and musical works that emplace or emplot Black past interrelatedness as ruptures that specifically counter notions of contributive civilizational nonparity, or rather, a false tabla rasa: historical, artistic, or literary allusions to no ancient and/or pejorative derivation.
Jorge Serrano