Overview

The Harvard scholar, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., travels the African Continent, from Ethiopia to South Africa, from West Africa to East Africa, but the resulting creation, Wonders of the African World is a diasporic monologue. He can represent and invent Africa for an American audience but cannot contemplate the possibility that Africans can represent him. Wonders of the African World provides yet another example of the larger “invention-of-Africa” monologue in which the continent merely functions as a physical backdrop to the thought processes of others. Everyone but Africans can think about Africa and the world.

“Representing African Americans” intends to critically investigate and convert this monologue into a dialogue that recognizes African voices. It seeks to reinstate a theoretical framework that may help understand the shared destiny of African peoples and peoples of African descent throughout the world. Thus, while acknowledging the centrality of the African-American experience within the Black Diaspora, this project also argues that this centrality requires a critical investigation of the representations of Black America in the cultural productions of Africans, Antilleans, Haitians and Black Europe. We recognize the force of the enduring cross-currents in the making of post-modernist world. 

A collection of essays from the conference will be published and will prove to be an original contribution in the field of diasporic black studies. Proceedings from this conference will be published in a special issue of Research in African Literatures, the premier journal of African literatures in the United States.

The purpose of this event is to theorize black intellectual life in the 21st century from the multiple disciplinary vantage points of scholars in African & African-American Studies. The goal is not to define intellectuals; rather, “Thinking Black Intellectuals” is a demonstration, celebration, and assertion of intellectual production throughout the African diaspora. Moreover, this event respectfully responds to the deep investment in critical thought demonstrated by the life and career of FDI’s namesake: abolitionist, statesman, and man-of-letters, Frederick Douglass.

Guest Speakers
Grant Farred, Tom DiPiero, Stephanie Li, Jeffrey Tucker, Sharon Willis, Cilas Kemedjio, Ashley Dawson, Marlon Ross, A. Joan SaabDavid Roediger, Judith Byfield, Ben Carrington, Larry Hudson, Valentin Y. Mudimbe, John Michael, and Victoria Wolcott.

Co-sponsored by the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies and South Atlantic Quarterly and the U of R Humanities Project