CALL FOR PAPERS IS NOW CLOSED
Race, Roots, and Resistance: Revisiting the Legacies of Black Power
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign March 30-April 1, 2006
The Black Power Movement of the 1960s was one of the most significant developments in the African American experience, perhaps second only to emancipation in its transformation of U.S. race relations. Black Power exploded across the United States and the world, unleashing a torrent of rage and creativity, innovation and anger. Black Power transformed individual’s personal lives, local communities, the nation and global relations. Succeeding the civil rights phrase of the Black Freedom movement, Black Power remapped the nation’s understanding of race, challenged liberal conceptions of democracy, and established the groundwork for multiracial coalitions. Black Power’s impact on African Americans was even more striking, it fundamentally transformed African Americans’ consciousness and identity, culture, and strategic approach to politics, economics, and education. Black Power inspired the most broad-based and significant outpouring of cultural creativity in African American history. Black Power stimulated a renewed interest and involvement in global politics—in Pan-Africanism and Black internationalism, and in the global dimensions of racial oppression. Black Power’s reverberations continue to shape contemporary African American civil society and ideology.
Yet, the Black Power movement has rarely received an unbiased scholarly appraisal, it has predominately been condemned or dismissed in scholarly discourse. The Black Power movement is currently undergoing an academic renaissance. On the one hand, renewed interest in the 1960s has yielded a variant on this tradition it has produced a tendency to erase Black Power by absorbing it into the civil rights movement. On the other hand, new scholar-activists are reinvestigating the (in)famous, forgotten and unknown activists, organizations, and events, and delineating their local, global and contemporary significance.
The purpose of this conference, then, is to explore the legacies of the Black Power movement, its impact on the 1960s and contemporary U.S. society and the world.
African American Studies at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, is sponsoring a conference, Race, Roots, and Resistance: Revisiting the Legacies of Black Power (March 30-April 1, 2006). We are seeking papers and panels that engage the complexities and nuances not only reinterpret the past or examine current conditions, but that also chart the trajectory for Black liberation and radical social transformation. Conference panels will examine:
- Black Power and the Arts
- Black Power and Black Women
- Black Power and Black Studies
- Black Power on Film
- Black Power and Electoral Politics
- Black Political Prisoners
- Black Power and Entrepreneurship
- Black Student Union: Past and Present
- Black Power and Black Studies
- Black Power and Gender
- Black Power and Hip Hop
Send abstracts for Race, Roots, and Resistance: Revisiting the Legacy of Black Power to aasrp@illinois.edu by December 15, 2005 Please also include a short 150 word biographical sketch. For more information, please call (217) 333-7781.
