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The Routes of Black Studies

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Symposium Statement

Traditional narratives of the origin and institutional vicissitudes of Black Studies have become, by now, familiar:  birth in the crucible of social unrest, the promise of cultural vindication, embattled relations and bitter splits among kin, disappointment in the prodigal's betrayal and the ubiquitous sacrifice of patriarchs--and occasionally matriarchs.  The nearly mythic force of these narratives and their ruling images are quite recognizable, and, indeed, appealing if for no other reason than the fact that they provide an opportunity to imagine oneself as incommensurably distinct from Black Studies and all it might signify.  These narratives also mark shifting boundaries of intellectual terrain as they travel unpredictably across spaces and time.  It is precisely their power to mark and their tendency to shift that make these familiar tropes and borders so able to persevere.  In short, they allow outsiders, in this case, those in the "mainstream," to situate themselves in relation to the overarching concept of blackness.

The conversations to be taken up in The Routes of Black Studies will be framed in relation to the struggle over the signification of blackness for two important reasons.  The first perhaps is simply practical.  As a theme, the struggle over this powerful sign is arguably the one thread that successfully links the myriad temporal and spatial locations that dot the landscape of the emergence of Black Studies as a field, while also entangling the multiple agents who have assisted and resisted the formation of knowledge and gathered beneath or in a relationship to this (inter)discipline.  To that end, participants in this symposium will come carrying the specificities of time and place in their reflections and their wisdom.  The second reason these discussions find a frame in the struggle over the signification of blackness is a bit more theoretical.  The wildly variant knowledges produced in and around Black Studies have in common an inextricable implication in what blackness means and how it operates.  These epistemes always link the ephemeral with the real and are always motivated by material social relations and concrete cultural practices:  actual surveillance, actual arrest, actual bodies and actual bone. 

Attending to the power of the metaphor of travel (the movement of people, of information, of capital, of culture, of epistemologies), this conference begins with the simultaneous backward and forward looking implied in roots and routes as concepts.  Movement through the symposium schedule will take us from the many places and intellectual spaces Black Studies has called home--its roots--and through some of the intellectual locations its desire has mapped before it--its routes. Beginning with and departing from a social and intellectual history and cultural studies based appraisal of the historical legacies that run through Black Studies, the latter portions of the symposium will move towards the post-civil rights age trajectories, literary theory, trauma studies and LGBT studies have in mind for the ongoing formation of the field. 

 

Symposium Co-sponsors

Stanford Humanities Center
American Cultures Workshop
Program in American Studies
Department of History
Department of English
Institute for Research on Women and Gender
Program in African and African American Studies

With major support from the

Office of the Dean of Humanities and Sciences