Celebrating the diversity of understandings, explanations, and explorations into the meaning of blackness within cultural, political, philosophical, and aesthetic life, Duquesne University in conjunction with the Black Aesthetics and Politics series invites participants from a wide range of disciplines and mediums to this year’s topic, Black ExistentialismS: Situating Black Existential Philosophy. This year’s conference focuses the different experiences and differential histories and different existentialisms throughout the Diaspora. What are those aspects of living that influence who we are, what we are, and our world. While geography or place has become a critical aspect of much of existential philosophy, we have yet to fully acknowledge and incorporate it in the creation of knowledge and the construction of world and identity for black existentialism. Black ExistentialismS asks whether place is significant in the construction of race identity, or if the experience of race is ubiquitous throughout the world.
This conference seeks to provide multi-dimensional aural and intellectual encounters and experiences ranging from innovative paper presentations to poetry to monologue, to music to photography and installation and stage art as a means of expressing black existentialisms. We are interested in the development of differential accounting of the meaning and experiences of being black; through articulating our differences we come to appreciate our deeper similarities.
Themes and/or topics include, but are not limited to:
Philosophical foundations for black existentialisms
What are black existentialisms?
History of black existentialism
Black American existentialism
African existentialism
Caribbean existentialism
Indigenous black existentialism
Comparative black existentialisms
Black Futurism
Black being (ontology)
Black Phenomenology and existentialisms
Black existentialisms in literature
Black existentialisms and feminism
Black existentialisms and womanism
Black existentialisms in black political theory
Black existentialisms and black aesthetic theory
Black existentialisms and contemporary black culture (e.g. hip-hop, film, etc)
Black existentialisms and post-blackness
Black existentialism and post-humanism
Submission Deadline: December 1, 2012
Send submissions and inquiries to hailej1@duq.edu