With the rise of interdisciplinary fields such as Global South studies, Indian Ocean studies, and Afro-Asian studies, the primacy of the Black Atlantic paradigm for explaining modern racialization, political economy, and the world system has faced pressure for its focus on a third of the globe. In this session, we seek to bring the rest of the planet into relationship with the Atlantic region to think through the multiple simultaneous dynamics that produced and reproduce the concept of Blackness and its figurative and material practices.

In this regard, we think not only of the global contours of Euro-American imperial projects (both present and past), the multiple relationships between slavery and indenture, and the traffic in bodies in and around the African continent, but also representations of Blackness and carcerality such as the South Asian notion of the kala pani, which denotes both the "black waters" of the ocean, on which enforced migration was understood as a loss of caste status, and the colonial British prison facility (the Kala Pani) on the Andaman Islands (also known as the Cellular Jail). And, yet, because of the deep historical trauma of chattel slavery and the preeminent role of North America in the formation of contemporary political, economic, and cultural domains, the notion of a global Black studies also invites critique for ostensibly sidelining these facts.

Drawing from literary texts as well as works in other genres of creative and social expression, the participants will address the following interrelated questions:

• How does the prefix "global" alter, expand, or complicate notions and practices of Black studies?

• Conversely, how does Black study of the world enhance understandings of the global?

Additional questions for the participants to consider will be circulated in the fall, such as the following:

• What are the temporalities of Blackness, of globality? How do these three terms—temporality, global, Black—inform one another?

• Has Black studies always been global?

• What role does literature, traditionally conceived, play in relation to other forms of cultural expression vis-à-vis heterogeneous Black experiences?

• What theories and praxis prevail, or need to be foreground, in contemporary Black studies? And what are the roles and responsibilities of those in the academy to work with communities beyond their professional institutions?

• How does Black studies—in its interdisciplinary formation as well as in the different theoretical and methodological approaches it makes possible—inform critiques of disciplinarity and identitarianism, with and against cognate fields such as Asian American studies, African studies, or Caribbean studies (to name a few)? 

Confirmed Participants

• Dr. Dorothy Tsuruta, San Francisco State University

• Chriss Sneed, University of Connecticut

• Dr. Michael Datcher, Loyola Marymount (Los Angeles)

• Kun Huang, Cornell University

• Dr. Asimina Nikolopoulou, Grinnell College

• Jasmine Wade, University of California Davis

• Dr. Trent Masiki, Boston University

• Chair, co-organizer: Dr. Neelofer Qadir, University of North Carolina Greensboro

• Co-organizer: Sean M. Kennedy, City University of New York Graduate Center and Gettysburg College