More than 70 international scholars – from as far away as South Africa, Australia, France, Italy and the United Kingdom – will present papers on “The Black Body: Imagining, Writing and Rereading” at a DePaul University conference April 23 and 24 in the Student Center, 2250 N. Sheffield Ave., Chicago.

Both conference days open with a keynote address at 9 a.m. in Room 120. Dorothy Roberts, the Northwestern University Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law, will speak Friday; and Homi Bhabha, chair of Harvard University’s department of history and literature and the school’s Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language will speak Saturday.

Paper presenters will examine how meaning has been projected and inscribed on the black body and how these meanings are read, interpreted and interrogated. The conference addresses five thematic strands around which paper topics are clustered: myth, desire and fantasy; policing and disciplining; loathing, disfiguring and disappearance; aesthetics and politics of the body; and subversive bodies and resistance.

“The Black Body” conference is open to students, faculty and the general public and is sponsored by DePaul’s Center for Black Diaspora. For registration information and descriptions of panels and paper topics, visit the Center for Black Diaspora Web site at: http://condor.depaul.edu/~diaspora/ .