Dear all,

first and best greetings in 2012... I hope you have all settled in well for "work and play" ahead... For CAAR, this will be one of our off-conference years, giving us time to gear up for our next big event in Atlanta, spring of 2013, hosted by Violet Johnson at Agnes Scott. This will be the first of our own conferences in the US - we are excitedly looking forward to the chance of cooperation and exchange with African American Studies scholars whom we haven't been able to meet at previous conferences in Europe.
At the beginning of the new year, I would also very much like to thank all you CAAR members, colleagues and friends who have sent in news, links, queries, and other contributions to the CAAR list serv and website, and also urge you kindly to continue sharing information and debate with CAAR. We hope to carry on building an internationally vibrant African-American and Black Studies network which will be as active and lively as its members and contributors. Conference calls for paper, reports of events, publication announcements and questions for debate all are welcome!
Best and (today) sunny winter greetings from Bremen.

Sabine Broeck

 Dear colleagues,

As this year is barreling through its last weeks, with colorful lights and shopping muzak everywhere – which, alas, do a poor job of dispelling dreadful weather – I catch myself thinking about the relevance of literature to the lives of people caught up in the holiday season madness.  How many of them try to escape the mundane rush of their lives by diving into a novel?  Do they imagine new possibilities for themselves while reading a play? Or do they ponder rhythms and seductions of poetic metaphor while figuring out what it is that they want the New Year to bring?

These questions, no doubt prompted by numerous doomsayers who proclaim the end of literacy left and right, have been haunting me.  They do so especially as I am nearing the end of teaching my course on American literature, narrative, and spatiality, “Self, Story, and Space: Humanities Approaches to American Culture,” here at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.  As has been the case before – I have taught this class for several years, each time with a gifted doctoral candidate assistant – some students remain impervious to the power of image and voice in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye or to the ambivalences of woman’s place in Puritan society as imagined by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.  They sit quietly, with incomprehension in their eyes (if their eyes are open at all) or with that bored, enduring look I’ve learnt to recognize to mean: “I’ve not read this stuff, and I don’t care.”  But more than before, some of them, and on several occasions the majority, participate in discussion and venture smart opinions about their readings.   So, perhaps not everything is yet lost with this generation plugged into mobile devices, texting and twittering in their sleep, even when they were better studying.  Apparently, some of them are able to muster an attention span required to comprehend a plot, to appreciate complexities of characterization, not to mention to experience the pleasure and thrill of interacting with the cadences of the written word.  I may be erring on the optimistic side, but ‘tis the season of hope and rebirth, and so I want to list a few other reasons for all of us to be hopeful about literature, and African American literature specifically, these days.

Just a couple of months ago, I took part, for the first time, in the biannual Penn State University conference, “Celebrating African American Literature: Race, Sexual Identity, and African American Literature.”  Several generations of scholars and artists gathered there showed us how literature made things happen; they made intersectional identities and bodies these identities inhabit matter in new and provocative ways.  We honored our literary ancestors, paid homage to our mentors and charted new courses for archival research, history writing, and trans-genre pedagogy.  Too many to mention by name, the speakers at the event ranged in focus from those working on a myriad of single authors, through those examining wide swaths of cultural history, not to mention the ones laboring on new theoretical and methodological tools.  One of the keynotes revisited the ways in which the autobiographic impulse of first African American texts inspired auto-ethnographic explorations of life stories and experience of gay Blacks in the American South.  Such projects remind us about the importance of learning from our elders and encountering our subjects in flesh and blood so that we can establish not only a whole new “archive of feeling,” but also make possible interrogating the ways in which we must re-write history of a region, a people, a nation and its literatures through individual lives.

Other scholars at this exciting conference engaged terms and discourses, writers, and theories that, until recently, had not been put to the proverbial bed together:  interracial queernes, utopia and ideology, hyper-masculinity and transgender, ethnographic gaze and its unwilling objects, or the provocative ways in which black women writers have engaged and challenged masculine narrative models.  And … yes, I have not mentioned the pairing of race and sex, which at this conference seemed so obvious, that we almost forgot that it was still not so obvious, or even welcome, to many in our diverse field of African American and African Diaspora Studies.  We were also reminded, in another plenary and via a tour de force of recent writing on race, gender, and class, that literature can make you free, but …  capital can make you write things you might want to be ashamed of.  (As should be the author of The Help and her ilk.)

In “A letter to my godson,” a provocative rewriting of James Baldwin that opens his The Fire this Time (2007), Randal Kenan writes of the hope that can be borne only of a profound love of the written word, and of a profound desire to share that love’s power with our students and readers: “Your generation will be the freest people of color this nation has ever engendered: free of racial guilt, free of the burden of representation, free of expectations, high or low–you will not be expected to lift up the race, nor will you be shackled with the hope that your every step will drag along an entire population toward some Promised Land.  … You will be like ravens.  Free to pick and choose, beautiful, raucous … both trickster and avatar. … Did you know, once upon a time, black folk could fly?  Or so it has been said.  A hidden truth.  A metaphor.  A way of looking at yourself in the world.  Remember that when you think you are stuck in the mud.”

I was also encouraged by attention to personal facts and questions about writers’ lives echoed in this event – who did she or he love and why?  Where did they live and how?  Such queries raise issues about embodied authorship and effects of racial markings on the material body that belong in the realm of biography, perhaps, yet should be interrogated closely by both scholars and students.  Baldwin’s words, directed at William Faulkner, the words that provided the banner for the conference, reflect what must be the focus, more than ever, of the multifaceted project of not only literary studies but all the humanities as we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century: “Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.”  In their different ways, African American writers and artists have been posing this sentiment for over half a century.

In 1970, Baldwin explained to Nikki Giovanni what made him write and what made his job important to all, no matter whether they read him or not:

… The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him. The act of writing is the intention of it; the root of it is liberation.  Look, this is why no tyrant in history was able to read but every single one of them burned the books (Dialogue, 82).

Baldwin’s insistence on being a witness, on recording how we live and who we are reminds me, too, that we are all minds enclosed in bodies that experience pain, illness, discomfort, that give us joy, pleasure, and enable our work.  To think of it in Baldwinian terms, as a script for the humanities now, there is no true living and teaching without acknowledging embodiment, without being present as a material being.  Baldwin often talked about the need for touching and being touched by others, or for genuine human contact that acknowledges and celebrates connection and understanding despite difference, politics, and ravages of history.  His idea encompassed wide extremes, from the nurturing “laying on of hands” to comfort friends and family members to the passionate embraces of lovers. 

As teachers and scholars we not only produce knowledge about the human subject but also provide guidance and anchoring for the actual bodies and minds that we reach …  even for those we may never reach, those who consider the humanities a superfluous luxury, those to whom literary metaphors and open minds are liabilities.  To me and my students, as we end this semester and prepare ourselves for the feasting and reflection brought on by the upcoming holidays, all of them, writers like Baldwin and the riches of African American literature that surround and contextualize his career offer important guidance.  And I say this even though I fully realize that many of the students will forget the class, our readings, and passionate discussions once the final examinations are over.  Such is the prerogative of youth and, yes, of hungry minds that have much to learn and explore before finding their own space, self, and story.  I know that the books will be there if they only choose to return to them. 

This tentative hope is enough of a gift for me this season.  Baldwin repeated over and over that our unique, often troubled, origins are something that make us all equal and related; all people are brothers and sisters.  In its best moments, the young of today seem to be catching onto this message, to the gift that is the discovery that reading stories makes us better at reading one another as human beings.  And, yes, because we are all accidents of geography and genetics, our job as teachers of literature, as scholars in the humanities, is both never-ending and necessary. 

Magdalena J. Zaborowska, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA

Dear all,

I would like to share with you my readings of France’s struggle with its continuous and discontinuous identities.

 Recently French media have given full coverage to Blacks of and in France following the publication of books and magazines which, on the one hand, question the symbolism of a common French identity and, on the other hand, celebrate the 50^th anniversary of Frantz Fanon. The literary productions were accompanied by films, exhibitions and talk shows examining the history of Blacks of and in France, and revisiting the colonial past of the French Republic through the exhibitions of its “exotic” subjects. Those events which are part of a program called “Black France” explore the presence and role of Black people in France and their erasure or performance in the national narrative. At the crossroads of popular and scholarly discourse, they invest diverse cultural spaces in Paris and in major cities across France, from the Musée du Quai Branly to City Hall, from alternative places to movie theatres.

The revelation of a self-identified Black Frenchness and the emergence of a deferred history and a divided geography have crossed over to the political sphere with the candidacy of the former president of the CRAN (Representative Council of Black Associations) to the presidential election of 2012 and the publication by the Ministry of Overseas French Departments and Territories of a report on the memory of ethnographic and colonial exhibitions.  Traditional media hesitate to cover actions that run counter to the one and indivisible credo of the French Republic, but, when they do so, it might be for the wrong reason. The press reported on this presidential candidate because he is under investigation for misuse of funds instead of engaging the implication of the campaign’s slogan, “ne votez pas blanc,” whose meaning plays with the color of the skin of other candidates and the blankness of the ballot.

The use of the French term “noir” on front pages and in headlines and “blanc” in the presidential election has stirred controversy as it is seen to embody a multicultural discourse and an approach that disrupts France’s republican pact. Nonetheless, the multiplication and plurality of events that remember the Black presence in France and celebrate the lives of writers and other famous Black individuals enrich and complicate the cultural, social and historical landscape. The movement towards the transformation of French society through the recording of Blacks’ experiences is not new. It has already been documented in conferences and film festivals. Yet its continuation and the extent of those projects testify to the dynamic mechanisms of power in place and to the desires of engaging and redefining established ways of being French.

Arlette Frund

Dear Everyone,

Twenty years ago, Julie Dash broke new ground in the American film industry when she became the first African-American woman to write, direct and produce a film that opened with a nationwide release. Dash, who studied film at the University of California at Los Angeles, broke with American tradition by producing a film replete with luscious images of black beauty, sensuality and Gullah family traditions, set against the backdrop of the opulent Lowcountry landscape. Indeed, with “Daughters of the Dust,” Dash offered African-Americans a new way to see ourselves.

Set at the turn of the 20th century, the film chronicles the experiences of the Peazant clan‚ a Gullah family contemplating migration to the mainland from their home on a fictional sea island. Dash invokes her family history and ancestral traditions and employs historical narratives and primary source materials to develop a comprehensive cinematic depiction of Gullah life and traditions. Watching the film is in many ways like reading the works of African-American literary icons such as Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker and the late Paule Marshall. Dash recognizes the visceral ways African- American culture in general and Lowcountry Gullah traditions specifically are influenced by West African and African diasporan historical, cultural and religious traditions.

A cult classic among African-American artists and academics, “Daughters‚” as it is affectionately known by those of us who love and teach it‚ continues to be the “go-to” film for professors and researchers of African-American and black studies, black feminist criticism, film studies, art and interdisciplinary studies looking for positive, visually stimulating, thought-provoking and historically accurate portrayals of African-American history and culture.

Told through the voice of an unborn child, the film demonstrates the prominence of religious and cultural syncretism – the melding of two or more religious or cultural traditions – found within the myriad of African-American traditions at work throughout the United States, particularly those of the Gullah sea islands. Here Dash situates Gullah traditions – naming rituals, generational rites of passage and religious practices including Christianity, Islam and traditional West African spiritual cosmologies – within a wider discourse of pan-African history and identity. In other words, her characters – Nana Peazant, Eula, Eli, Viola, Yellow Mary, Bilal, Mr. Snead and the unborn child – represent visible “Africanisms” and cultural nuances inherited from our African, European and Native American ancestors and as a result of their cultural sharing due to slavery, migration and international travel and trade.

This is Not Your Typical Hollywood Black Film

“Daughters” is not for those looking for a film that glorifies African-American familial dysfunction, violence, drama or comedic relief. It is both enlightening and entertaining; the iconic cinematography alone is sheer magic, transporting viewers back in time, to and fro between the spiritual and natural realms and then onto the shores of the sea islands. The actors are complex, full-bodied representations of all that is black, beautiful and complicated. Eula and Eli try to keep their family together through the reality that Eula has been raped by a white man, leaving the paternity of the unborn child in question. There is Viola, the educated but timid granddaughter of Nana, who has shirked the folkways and embraced Christianity as a means of salvation. Perhaps one of the most memorable and controversial characters in the film is Yellow Mary‚ who returns home with her female lover after years of worldly behavior on the mainland. Struggling to keep the family together are Nana‚in the natural world‚ and the unborn child‚ in the spiritual realm. They are inextricably tied together, for, as Nana tells her children, “The ancestors and the womb are one.”

Nana Peazant is the matriarch who passes the family’s history and traditions down to generations of her progeny, thereby keeping the family together. Like many elders who cleave to folkways and ancestral traditions, Nana draws wisdom from her decades of experience as a mother, wife and former slave. Unlike her eager and ambitious offspring, she understands the challenges awaiting her family in the North, which will not be “the land of milk and honey” they envision. The heart of the story is in many ways the quest for the American dream. Having persevered decades of subjugation, first as enslaved Africans, then as marginalized “saltwater Negroes” of the Gullah sea islands, the Peazant family dreams of opportunity and self-determination, having been let down by the failings of Reconstruction. Now at the turn of the century, with the rise of industrialism, Nana’s children and grandchildren decide to leave their sequestered island home, in hopes of finding prosperity.

In September, the Avery Research Center at the College of Charleston and the Charleston County Public Library celebrated Dash’s accomplishments as a filmmaker and novelist. On Sept. 16 and Sept. 17, the center hosted a two-day symposium titled “We Carry These Memories Inside of We: Celebrating the 20th Year Anniversary of ‘Daughters of the Dust’ and The Black Art Aesthetic of Julie Dash,” which brought together scholars, artists and fans of the film and Dash.

For two days, we came together to pay homage to the living legacy of Julie Dash and her work as a filmmaker and writer. It was a great celebration of Black womanhood and sisterhood, and at the end of the symposium, it was clear that we are all Daughters of the Dust.

Dr. Patricia Williams Lessane (College of Charleston)

dear all,

at least for many European academics, August was down time. Catching up with reading, grading, clearing the desk. The (relative) quietness of it suddenly interrupted by the violent youth protest in Spain:  mostly white kids fighting against being cheated of a future they have been educated to take for granted, and by the riots in Britain: many of them young black kids fighting a racist present and future which they no longer want to take as their due.

One finds oneself watching those struggles on tv, wondering how European academia will relate to those struggles. Wondering how CAAR members and friends respond to it: do they have kids, friends, relatives involved? Are our students becoming active in such movements?  Would we want to address those upheavals in classes where we teach historical documents of African-American liberation, or the black cultures of resistance? And how would we do that without ventriloqiusm? 

Any and all responses and suggestions to these questions very welcome... standing by with late summer greetings,
Sabine Broeck

dear all,

Having now entered the midsummer phase, all of us, I take it, are winding down a little bit from semester routines, and I am hoping you will find time for some writing, thinking, gazing, or other pleasant, and challenging, but not everyday activities.

 CAAR has had a successful first half year 2011, what with the vibrant Paris conference, and new FORECAAST titles coming out, as you will know from having been there, or from list serv and this site. After a conference, however, is before the conference, and before other activities.

Work has been in progress on further FORECAAST issues, among them titles on Blackness and Modernities, on Black Knowledges, and on States of Desire; a group of CAAR scholars from the universities of Nantes, Montpellier, Bremen  and Ferrara is in the planning process for an international  symposium at the University of Nantes, March 16/17, 2012, about Writing Slavery After Beloved: Literature, Historiography, Criticism, for which the cfp is being circulated.

And, last not least, Violet Johnson and her colleagues at Agnes Scott are gearing up with other institutions and colleagues in Atlanta for the next regular international CAAR conference 2013. I am optimistic that we will see many known and as yet unknown faces there, as we do at every conference.

Please do keep in touch over the next months - notes, event information, debate are always very welcome. For now, have a good summer.
Greetings from Bremen
Sabine Broeck

Dear Everyone,

As I write this overlooking my small, sun-drenched town garden in Madrid, I cannot get out of my head the “Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves” from Verdi’s Nabucco. A colleague sent me a link this week of a recent performance of the chorus at the Teatro dell’Opera, Rome’s Opera House, in which director Ricardo Muti used the traditional encore to voice – literally – his condemnation of the degradation of Italy’s political and cultural institutions under the premiership of Silvio Berlusconi.

The stirring and moving chorus is popularly associated with the yearning for freedom from slavery and oppression and I cannot disengage it in my mind from the seemingly uncontainable clamour for democratic reform sweeping North Africa and beyond.

In Europe we are geographically very close to these events; we are even closer to their material consequences – the displacement of tens of thousands of human beings seeking immediate safety from the violent suppression of the pro-democracy demonstrations. Europe’s response has been mixed (no surprise there) and by no means uniformly praiseworthy.

Alongside not always coordinated or effective interventions against pro-Gaddafi forces, some countries have been less than welcoming of the stream of refugees. The Berlusconi government, for example, has manipulated European Union laws governing movement within its borders in order to disperse towards France Tunisians arriving on the island of Lampedusa.

In a latest twist, both French and Italian governments are now proposing a revision of the Treaty of Schengen in order to re-establish passport and border controls within Europe’s heartland. The responses of Italian and French administrations must be viewed within the general context of regressive and nationalistic anti-immigration sentiments sweeping Europe in general. The latest country to join the list is Finland. It hardly needs stressing that these anti-immigration sentiments (frequently endorsed by laws) are racially driven: no-one in Europe wants to expel white Australians or blonde South Africans.

All of which brings me back to the Paris CAAR conference and my renewed sense of the relevance of African American and Diaspora studies to how we live our lives. There was even a panel, “Theorizing the System: from the Black Enlightenment to the Post-Race,” which challenged Paul Gilroy (Against Race) and the ‘post-racial’ and ‘race-blind’ theories of contemporary U.S. pundits. The likes of Berlusconi, et al. remind us that we must remain attentive to the racist underpinnings of Western societies and that critical race thinking remains, alas, far from redundant.

Saludos,

Isabel Soto

dear all,

spring has come to Northern Germany like a nice surprise,  so i am able to send out cheerful and sunny greetings today. This is the first editorial after the  productive and very well attended caar conference in Paris.

Thanks again to Jean Paul Rocchi and his splendid team for organizing such a memorable event! I am hoping all of you who came to paris returned home safe and sound, and will already be looking forward to the next big event, 2013 in Atlanta, as we are on the Caar board. after the conference is before the conference, and  I am sure, as Violet said at the membership assembly, excitement will be running high for the first CAAR event in the US, and on such "historical grounds"... We also will organize CAAR board elections in the summer, so members will be hearing from the board very soon.
 
On another note: at the conference, we presented another issue in the FORECAAST series, Blackness and Disability, which Christopher Bell had almost seen to publication, before he passed away, and which we publish in his honor.

As Steven Taylor, Centennial Professor of Disability Studies at Syracuse University, writes, this volume fills " a glaring gap in the literature by examining the intersection between race - specifically blackness - and disability."  Just out with FORECAAST also: Simon Dickel, Black/Gay. The Harlem Renaissance, the Protest Era, and Constructions of Black Gay Identity in the 1980s and 90s.  And in the next few weeks, we will see publication of Isabel Soto Garcia and Violet M. Johnson (Eds.) Western Fictions, Black Realities Meanings of Blackness and Modernities.

We are also hoping for another active two years of communication on the listserv - to keep our international  exchange and debate afloat between conferences...

best greetings meanwhile from Bremen,

Sabine Broeck

Dear all,

What would Fanon say?

This is the question that I have been asking as I continue to follow the unfolding uprisings in North Africa and other parts of the Middle East. Coincidentally, this is the same arena in which Martiniquan psychiatrist and revolutionary thinker Franz Fanon pondered the dynamics of liberation struggles and crafted his classics, The Wretched of the Earth and the short pieces that were anthologized posthumously in Toward the African Revolution.

Interpreting the independence struggle in Algeria where he lived, worked, wrote and fought in the 1950s and writing from Tunisia, to which he fled, Fanon emphasized the inevitability of the eventual activist consciousness of the repressed and their ability to spontaneously agitate, even if violently, for their rights. As he put it: “The events in Algeria are the logical consequence of an abortive attempt to decerebralize a people.”

The colonial and imperial repression that Fanon studied has been succeeded by variants of postcolonial repression within our own globalized, cyberspace world. In spite of the nuances and stark differences between epochs, it can hardly be denied that these times would benefit from a revisit of Fanon and his works.

Other ghosts besides Fanon’s are also lurking: Claudia Jones, Walter Rodney, Amilcar Cabral, Martin Luther King Jnr., Ella Baker, Malcolm X, A Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin. The relevance of those of even much earlier periods is clearer than ever. Indeed, what would Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells say? As we try to interpret the events in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Bahrain, the need to revisit the works of these activists who agitated and explained black and human struggles before our time has never been greater.

In a few weeks we will congregate in Paris to share our works on a variety of aspects relating to the CAAR conference theme, “Black States of Desire.” Undoubtedly, during our lunch and tea/coffee breaks (or even during planned sessions) our thoughts and conversations will turn to the present-day “twitterized” liberation struggles; and Fanon, Rodney, Baker, King and other historical revolutionary philosophers might be invoked. See you in Paris!

Violet M. Showers Johnson, Agnes Scott College

Dear colleagues,

I am writing this editorial, or a meditation of sorts on my work as part of the CAAR cadre, with James Baldwin on my mind. While this is not so unusual given my decade-long involvement with this writer in my roles as a scholar and teacher, I am startled to think of him in a slightly new way as I prepare to attend the conference, “James Baldwin’s Global Imagination” at New York University in a few days.

Echoing Toni Morrison’s words, I have felt safe in the haven of this writer’s language and imaginary, no matter how terrifying and dangerous his topics. Baldwin’s rhetorical gifts made his medium into a thing of beauty that inspired and comforted the reader even when he or she raged along with the writer at the violence racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia that marred his time in the United States and abroad.

Today, his words help us to articulate outrage at dispiritingly similar calamities in our own difficult moment. But how often do we consider what kind of a literal price Baldwin’s literary labor exacted from him? What imprints on his frail, material body did his rage have?

As those who study Baldwin know well, he lived his life rather dangerously, working long hours when others slept, drinking and smoking more than was good for him. His work habits were not always so by choice, given his political commitments, frequent need for cash, and tight schedule as an activist. He was born with a lower back deformity that affected his walk, suffered bouts of severe depression and fatigue, and several times attempted suicide.

After his first trip to the South, in 1957, he had a nervous breakdown and wrote about it only fifteen years later, in No Name in the Street (1972), in these words; “I collapsed in the home of a friend … and surrendered to my nightmares … vanished. … [A] kind of wonder of terror overcame me, making me as useless as a snapped rubber band. … a pattern which I was never … to overcome.” He died of cancer of the esophagus in 1987, at the young age of sixty-three; his friend and typist from the Istanbul years, Brenda Rein, told me that “he rushed himself into the grave.”

These kinds of personal facts and questions they raise about embodied authorship and effects of racial markings on the material body belong in the realm of biography, perhaps, yet they should be, and have been, interrogated by many African diaspora scholars and critics.

I know, too, that they will be addressed, and answered again for me, by some of the participants at the “James Baldwin’s Global Imagination” conference, among them, the biographer and Jimmy’s close friend, David Leeming, his photographer, Sedat Pakay, the writer Colm Toibin, and scholars and students too numerous to mention here.

My own role will consist of two activities. First, I will be moderating a follow-up discussion of the screening of Sedat Pakay’s 1973 film about Baldwin in Istanbul, “James Baldwin: From Another Place,” a cinematic gem that takes on the writer, his body, and location with directness, honesty, and flair.

Second, I will participate in the closing panel, where I hope to raise some of the issues signaled here, and especially what it means to study gender, race, affect, and the body in this moment in the Baldwin and African American Studies scholarship.

The poster for the conference cites Baldwin’s words directed at William Faulkner and all of us, the words that to me reflect what must be the focus, more than ever, of the multifaceted project of the humanities as we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century: “any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.”

As financial crises and natural disasters explode around us, the end of safety has literal, and tragic, even fatal, meaning to millions of people and ecosystems around the globe – what Sabine Broeck wrote about so evocatively in the last month’s editorial. My thoughts about the toll that his art, travel, and participation in the Civil Rights Movement took on Baldwin’s body make me realize, yet again, that when I think of the “millions” suffering depravation, pain, and atrocities, I rarely allow myself to think of individual bodies, limbs, brains, faces contorted in pain and anguish.

In fact, like most of us given our built-in psychological defenses, I fear and avoid recalling such intense images of individual and singular instances of suffering because they are disturbing, uncomfortable, and simply overwhelming. No matter how naive and old-fashioned this may sound, I keep telling my students that it is the singularity of human experience, the uniqueness of each person and his or her place on this planet that has attracted me to the humanities as a larger field of study in the first place (and here I wholeheartedly second Violet M. S. Johnson’s call from the November editorial for scholarly unity across our adjacent fields and inter-disciplines).

We are all minds enclosed in bodies that experience pain, illness, discomfort, that give us joy, pleasure, and enable our work. To think of it in Baldwinian terms, as a script for the humanities now, there is no true living and teaching without acknowledging embodiment, without being present as a material being.

Baldwin often talked about the need for touching and being touched by others, or for genuine human contact that acknowledges and celebrates connection and understanding despite difference, politics, and ravages of history. His idea encompassed the nurturing “laying on of hands” to comfort friends and family members to the passionate embrace of lovers.

As teachers and scholars we not only produce knowledge about the human subject but also provide guidance and anchoring for actual bodies and minds that we reach … even for those we may never reach, those who consider the humanities a superfluous luxury, those to whom words and an open mind, in some places in the world, are liabilities.

Writers like Baldwin, who suffered the markings of difference, yet insisted that our unique origins were something that made all people “brothers” (sic!), show us why our job is both never-ending and necessary.

Magdalena J. Zaborowska, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA

Dear all,

Best new year’s wishes from Bremen.

This week finds us all again, I assume, mourning the human loss and the ravages of Haiti’s “te tremble.”

This is no peaceful remembrance though, because the news coming from Haiti speak so little of recovery and restoration, but so often of inconsiderate and corrupt politics, of a return to racist slander in the global media and of a lack of any really effective support system to build infrastructure and social institutions.

What we can do from our vantage points is to keep the information flow active, then, and not to participate in indifference. Please do send in letters, articles, interviews – what you have – about the ongoing grassroots efforts to reconstruct.

Counteracting the sadness was a visit to New York in the first week of 2011, and CAAR’s participation, with a panel, in the Schomburg Center of Black Studies’ conference on the state of African-American Studies …. a truly invigorating event.

For two days, dozens of multidisciplinary panels ranged across topics as various as, for example, literature and memory, the history of African-American Studies, or the issues of racial discrimination in public sectors other than education. A number of plenary sessions opened out a view of African-American Studies’ past and future.

What I found particularly useful and inspiring was the number of contributions by many younger scholars in African-American Studies that have taken a turn to historicize the field beyond grand and general heroic narratives.

Those projects examine the challenges and remaining questions of black research and activism within and beyond academia on the ground. They widen our scope to understand the roots of black knowledge going back far past the explosive moment of black studies in the 1960s, and they diversify and complicate our pictures of the actors, and objects of Black Studies to include previously neglected periods, like for example the allegedly conservative 1950s; or the unexamined legacy of 1930s and 1940s black women’s struggle for post-sixties womanism.

The very end of the conference brought forth one of its highlights, for me: a short but sharp and rousing speech/performance by Tricia Rose, who had us all on our feet in enthusiasm.

She exhorted her audience to keep respect for the “differences within” a black community that would never be homolithic, to address the challenges of struggle in the contemporary moment of racist discrimination and oppression which in its race/class /gender structuration of power differs considerably from the 1960s and following decades, and to learn to teach and research ‘within” but critical of, new technologies.

A very content and happy band of European African-Americanists left the Schomburg after two packed days and will return with stimulating memories and new questions.

The conference also paid moving and grateful tribute to the life long work of scholar and academic activist Howard Dodson for the Schomburg, for Harlem, for the African-American community, but also for New York’s intellectual and cultural life, as well as expressed gratitude to Colin Palmer and his Schomburg team for the splendid organization of the conference.

The designated new director of the Schomburg, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, was greeted enthusiastically (and welcomed with great expectations!), and addressed the audience about his vision for the future of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Most of all, he stressed his determination to keep both, the various scholarly and the neighborhood outreach programs alive and active, and to secure the library’s sustenance and growth as an international beloved scholarly center of excellence.

A hard act to follow but I am optimistically crossing my fingers for the next big CAAR event, our conference in Paris in April.

Greetings from Bremen, still wet and cold, wistful for spring.

Sabine Broeck