CAAR 2011 Paris: Black States of Desire: Dispossession, Circulation, Transformation in Paris, FRANCE, April 6-9.

The conference highlighted the recognition of the central historical contribution of black feminist studies and movements, notably lesbian, in the American and South African contexts. In both their sought-after inclusiveness and productive failures they are exemplary of individual change and collective reformation. This goal, once pursued by Audre Lorde and James Baldwin, and still to be reached, is here emblematized by the figures of desire and the black states.

In the wake of Lorde's esthetical and political alliance of the self and the community, of Baldwin's desiring consciousness and ethics of inclusion, desire and the black states are together rich with conscious revolutions to come. They work as immaterial and physical orientations, symbols of shifting identifications, of the diversity of black lived experiences. The black states of desire therefore set out to describe lack turned into impetus and actualization, the movement from what exists to what can be imagined and created, from words to the building stone, from statement to establishment.

Click here for the CAAR 2011 Paris Website.

CAAR 2007 Madrid: "Blackness and Modernities" Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia Madrid, SPAIN April 18-21, 2007.

CAAR 2007 focused upon 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 spoke of modernities because we did not want to define and dictate meaning; we wanted the conference to do the defining and any dictating to come from the power of the speakers. We wanted to consider ways in which peoples origined in Africa and living in the Americas have created as well as come to terms with modernism.

Click here for the CAAR 2007 Madrid Website

CAAR 2003 Winchester: "The African Atlantic: The Making of the Black Diaspora" University of Winchester Winchester, ENGLAND.

This conference will seek to take the longest and widest perspectives, viewpoints, and positions that speakers, panels and contributors can bring to the notions of the African Atlantic and the Black Diaspora. It will focus on the old triangle of Africa, the Americas and Europe as in previous conferences. However, by pulling back and out, other coasts and other worlds come into view. The Pacific of cities, states and provinces stretching from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego is a boundary of the Black Diaspora which calls for our examination, exegesis, evocation.

Download Call for Papers here
http://www.caar-web.org/pdf/caar_winchesterposter.pdf

CAAR 1999 Muenster: Third Conference of the Collegium for African American Research "Black Liberation in the Americas"Westphalian Wilhelms Universitaet Muenster Muenster, GERMANY

CAAR 1995 Tenerife: Inaugural Conference of the Collegium for African American Research "Transatlantic Passages" Universidad de La Laguna La Laguna, Tenerife, SPAIN