Apr 15, 2004
International Conference On “The Black Body: Imagining, Writing And Rereading” To Be Held At DePaul April 23-24
The black body serves as a subject of academic discourse and a focus of pop culture fixation throughout the Diaspora of African descendants. The topic will be explored from multiple perspectives when more than 70 international scholars – from as far away as Australia, France, Italy, South Africa and the United Kingdom – convene at DePaul University to present papers on “The Black Body: Imagining, Writing and Rereading” April 23 and 24 in the Student Center, 2250 N. Sheffield Ave., Chicago.
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.
Both conference days open with a keynote address at 9 a.m. in Room 120. Dorothy Roberts, Northwestern University’s (NU) Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law, will speak April 23 on “Unshackling Black Women’s Bodies.” Roberts, who teaches a course on women and their bodies, has authored, among several books, “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty.” She holds a joint appointment at NU as a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research and is a frequent speaker on issues related to race, gender and the law.
The conference’s second day starts with a keynote address by 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. Bhabha, distinguished by his scholarship on colonial and post-colonial theory, will address the topic “On Sembalent Solidarity: The Work of Albert Memmi.”
As part of the conference and in collaboration with the DePaul Art Museum, an exhibition is being shown in the north gallery at 2350 N. Kenmore Ave. Titled “Human Bodies in the Spirit World: Traditional African Sculpture from the Weber Collection,” the collection pays homage to the human form, which is one of the most widespread classical subjects in African art.“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/ .
Editors’s Note: JPEG images of key speakers and conference hosts are available upon request.