The Committee on LGBT History invites submissions for "Intersections: An Inaugural Black Queer Sexuality Studies Graduate Student Conference" to be held at Princeton University on October 20th, 2012. This conference seeks to create a public forum for dialogue on innovative research across disciplines and fields that interrogate the intersections between blackness and queerness. Professor Kara Keeling of the University of Southern California will be the Keynote Speaker. Submission deadline: August 31st, 2012.
Against an abjuring history, we ask: how might we understand the relationship between blackness and queerness if we first reject the premise of their mutual exclusivity? How might transit between blackness and queerness open up new pathways of thought to engage thinking concerned with a host of issues ranging from agency to temporality to phenomenology to resistance? Are we in a post-black or post-queer moment, and if so, how might a reinterrogation of both blackness and queerness reanimate supposedly deadened modes of inquiry?
We invite papers that engage blackness and queerness in all their richness, as both material negotiations that limn and give possibility to actual bodies and as metaphysics that operate in excess of the very bodies they help give name and shape. Our theme, "Intersections," follows from Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson's introduction to the seminal anthology Black Queer Studies, where they express their desires for black queer studies to marry the protest energies of black protest traditions to the radical interrogative traditions of queer theory. Our theme, purposefully broad, aims to include a range of disciplines including but not limited to, history, sociology, literary and cultural studies, black studies, queer studies, media studies, and art history. We especially seek scholarship from disciplines where a lacuna exists with regard to queer experiences and/or those of people of African descent.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
· Interrogations of same-sex desire in artistic production
· Queerness in the African diaspora
· Histories of black queer communities in the Americas and Africa
· Studies of conflicts between racial and sexual communities/individuals
· Imbrication/ conflicts between racial and sexual identities
Professor Kara Keeling of the University of Southern California will deliver the keynote address for this one-day conference. The conference will feature 16 presentations of original scholarship. Submission and acceptance to this conference will be based on blind reviews of 250-300 word abstracts. Please submit your abstracts and CV to bqsgraduateconference@gmail.com by August 31, 2012. All other inquiries should be directed to Brittney Edmonds (bedmonds@princeton.edu) or Jennifer D. Jones (jdjones@princeton.edu).
