Date:         Mon, 2 Nov 2009 15:35:28 +0000
Reply-To:     "Marsh, Kate" <clmarsh@LIVERPOOL.AC.UK>
Sender:       French Studies Discussion List <FRANCOFIL@liverpool.ac.uk>
Afromodernisms 1: Re-encounters with the French and Anglo-Atlantic Worlds,
1907–61

Symposium: University of Liverpool, UK
Thursday 15 April–Saturday 17 April 2010

First Call for papers: Closing date for call: 16 January 2010

In the context provided by Paul Gilroy’s configuration of the black Atlantic as
a counterculture to modernity, this symposium is the first in a series seeking
to re-examine the Atlantic as a locale for the emergence of modernism. Over the
period 2010–12, we hope to consider the centrality of black folk, artists,
writers, intellectuals, social scientists, musicians, as core members of the
modernist avant-garde, and of ‘blackness’ as a key representative and political
category in the work of other modernists. We begin from a formulation of
modernism as a heterogeneous cluster of responses to locally specific
experiences of modernity, rather than as a qualitative set of aesthetic
indicators privileging formal innovation over political rhetoric. In doing so,
we hope to enable further discussion of a widening spectrum of modernist
languages in which the experience of modernity is delineated and inscribed.

The symposium addresses the interactions, exchanges, conflicts, and
collaborations occurring across the French and Anglo Atlantic, and within
experienced and imagined spaces of blackness, in the period 1907–61. We begin
therefore with Picasso’s masked Demoiselles, and end with the publication of
Fanon’s radical rejection of western colonialism in Les damnés. The aims of the
symposium are fourfold:

First, it seeks to stage a re-encounter with avant-garde aesthetic, political
and social practice in the context of black responses to modernity across the
French and Anglo Atlantic.

Second, it explores the emergence of new disciplines or schools, and
underexplored interdisciplinary relationships in the human sciences that may
have effected or at least contributed to the formal innovation or ‘newness’
considered so characteristic of modernism.

Third, it takes Perry Anderson’s claim that one of the indispensible
co-ordinates for locating modernism is its ‘proximity to social revolution’ and
resituates in the context of an anti-colonial avant-garde operating across the
Atlantic in the inter- and postwar years.

Fourth, it considers the degree to which a variety of actors operating from
what might be termed ‘alternative’ or ‘displaced’ metropoles interacted to
produce, in Jameson’s terms, an ‘active sense’ of the history of modernity, one
in which a black presence was of key aesthetic, political and cultural
importance.

Individual papers and proposals, in English, for panels addressing any aspect
of the interrelationship between Afromodernism and the French and
Anglo-Atlantic worlds are invited from, but not limited to, the disciplines of
literature, anthropology, history, art history, philosophy, music, or
combinations of these; and concerning regions including but not limited to:
Africa, the Caribbean, insular and continental Europe, Canada, the United
States, Latin America.

Topics might include:
The Harlem Renaissance/New Negro; Performance and/of blackness; Expressionism;
fascism; exoticism; the tropics; ethnographic fieldwork narratives/collections;
the WPA; négritude; negrophilia; configurations of the Black Atlantic; masking;
marxism and modernity; primitivism; folk and established religious expression;
jazz; blues; surrealism; Boasian anthropology; tragedy; aesthetic politics;
drumming; new histories; revisionist historiography; beauty; comedy; revolution
and anticolonialism; myth; reaction; gender and modernity; nationalism; the
metropole(s); psychoanalysis; science and relativism; positivism; migration
and/or displacement; civilization; degeneration.

Proposal for panels should contain a panel title, working titles for individual
papers, with individual abstracts of 250 words each, and brief biographical
notes on the chair and/or speakers. For individual papers, please send a
working title, abstract of 250–350 words, and a biographical note to:
Fionnghuala Sweeney: fsweeney@liv.ac.uk or Kate Marsh: clmarsh@liv.ac.uk

Afromodernism 1 occurs against the backdrop the exhibition, Modernism and the
Black Atlantic, January – May 2010, curated by Tate Liverpool, and placing work
by American, Caribbean, African and European artists in relation to one another
and the Atlantic context in which they worked. Delegates will have the
opportunity to visit the exhibition during the course of the symposium.

Kate Marsh
Fionnghuala Sweeney



Dr Kate Marsh
School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies (French)
University of Liverpool
L69 7ZR
Tel. 0151 794 6965

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