Conferences
NEXT CAAR Conference: Liverpool 2015
The next CAAR conference will take place 24-27 June 2015 at Liverpool Hope University, UK.
Program and schedules t.b.a.
CAAR organized a number of conferences in the last years. Please find the details of the CAAR-conferences below.
CAAR 2013 Atlanta: Dreams Deferred, Promises and Struggles: Perceptions and Interrogations of Empire, Nation, and Society by Peoples of African Descent. Agnes Scott College, Decatur/Atlanta, GA, USA, March 13 to 16.
The tenth biennial conference of our collegium addressed the diverse and complex ways in which people of African descent have understood, embraced, and challenged the configurations of political entities and the societies within them both in the past and in the present. In the widely celebrated “Age of Obama” racial polarization, inequality, and interracial tensions persist. The conference highlighted the abiding urgency of maintaining a focus on African-American history and culture as we have moved into the twenty-first century. We also spoke about the importance of relating to international networks of the Black Diaspora and its cultural and political challenges, and about insisting on sincere anti-racism in the face of pre-emptive media campaigns to favor facile versions of post-racial harmony.
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 2009 Bremen: "Black Knowledges – Black Struggles – Civil Rights: Transnational Perspectives" at the University of Bremen Bremen, GERMANY Mar 25 – 29, 2009.
The Eighth Biennial Conference of the Collegium of African American Research explored the global epistemological, political, literary, and cultural impact of the many forms of African American diasporic knowledges and struggles and their enduring transnational manifestations
For a two-part video of an interview conducted during the conference with professional actor and academic Dr. Baron Kelly, who talks about Ira Aldrige, click here.
- Picture by Schultz, Yeboah and Norris
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 2005 Tours: "The Black World: INNERspace:INNERCity:InterAction:InterNation" Universite Francois-Rabelais Tours, FRANCE Apr 21-24, 2005.
INNERSpace: The spiritual, inner world of self and soul occupies spaces along and across the boundary lines of philosophy, religion, science, and art. INNERCity: Innercity life of Harlem, Watts, Atlanta, Chicago, Paris, Brixton, Berlin. INTERAction: What kinds of interaction are now making the scene in the art, culture and politics of the new African American? INTERNation: Catching the intonations of voices at the margins as well as at the centers: what will be the intercontinental alignments of the next fifty years?
- Picture by Schultz, Yeboah and Norris
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
https://www.caar-web.org/pdf/caar_winchesterposter.pdf
CAAR 2001 Cagliari: Fourth Conference of the Collegium for African American Research "CrossRoutes: The Meanings of Race for the 21st Century" Cagliari, Sardegna, ITALY
- Picture by Schultz, Yeboah and Norris
CAAR 1999 Muenster: Third Conference of the Collegium for African American Research "Black Liberation in the Americas"Westphalian Wilhelms Universitaet Muenster Muenster, GERMANY
CAAR 1997 Liverpool: Second Conference of the Collegium for African American Research "Mapping African America" Liverpool, ENGLAND
- Picture by Schultz, Yeboah and Norris