About the event
Keynote: Paul Gilroy, English, King’s College, London.
Twenty years after the publication of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), scholarship no longer simply posits the relationship between blackness and modernity as an irreconcilable problem. Though Gilroy posited The Black Atlantic as a ‘heuristic’ work, his ideas engendered debates in history, anthropology, and literary studies as well as political thought and philosophy—areas once perceived as the exclusive domain of an organic and hermetically sealed Western tradition. The Black Atlantic @ Twenty symposium (BA@20) aims to explore how Gilroy’s insistence that blackness figures as a constitutive element of modernity has effected a lasting transformation in knowledge production.
Thursday, October 24
In the Wake of The Black Atlantic: Pedagogy and Practice
Click here to watch a video of the conversation.
5:30-7:00pm, Elebash Recital Hall
In this roundtable discussion, faculty from various programs at CUNY will ask how their own scholarly practices have been changed by the work of Paul Gilroy and his many students. Specifically, they will examine the ways that Gilroy’s anti-nationalist analyses have—or have not—disrupted common practices within traditional disciplines. Drawing on courses taught in a variety of departments in the Fall 2013, Herman Bennett, Jacqueline Brown, Susan Buck-Morss, Kandice Chuh, Duncan Faherty, Sujatha Fernandes, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Robert Reid-Pharr will ask whether it is possible to produce innovative work around race, colonization, cosmopolitanism, and imperialism while also continuing to privilege traditional modes of intellectual inquiry. They will also begin a conversation about how the Graduate Center community might begin to restructure its basic research and pedagogical practices.
Friday, October 25
Stephan Palmié, For Reasons of History: Anthropology and the Black Atlantic, The Skylight Room, 9100
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Tina Campt, Rhizomorphs, Fractals and Other Formalities: A Black Atlantic Mixtape, The Skylight Room, 9100
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Eric Lott, Open Letters, The Skylight Room, 9100
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Paul Gilroy, The Half-Life of the Black Atlantic, Proshansky Auditorium
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Cosponsored by The Advanced Research Collaborative, the Certificate Program in American Studies, the Caribbean Epistemologies Seminar in the Humanities, IRADAC, and the Revolutionizing American Studies Initiative.
