23/24 November 2018
Deadline: 8 September 2018
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Nova University of Lisbon
Fifty year after the assassination of Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s is frequently memorialized as a moment of almost inevitable national redemption, when a call to the better angels of American consciousness brought the country together to overcome injustices that no longer plague the present. As historian Jeanne Theoharis argues in A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History (2018), this interpretative frame has frequently constructed a self-congratulatory discourse that whitewashes the immense obstacles and violence faced by the Civil Rights movement and its leaders, rather than soberly remember the “dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear” that, in Dr. King’s words, the movement demanded of its activists, and measure the incompleteness of what was then achieved. This process is seen in the yearly appeals to depoliticize Martin Luther King Day in the name of national unity and reconciliation, as well as in efforts to decouple the most successful social movement of the twentieth century from contemporary protests against lingering racial injustice (such as Black Lives Matter), often accused of distorting a sanitized version of its legacy.
The following topics are a sample of the broad scope of concerns the conference welcomes:
African-American literature and the civil rights movement
The Neo-slave narratives of the 1960s and after
The Black Arts Movement
African-American theater and civil rights: from Lorraine Hansberry to Suzan-Lori Parks
The Civil Rights Movement on the big and small screen
Music and Civil Rights: From “Mississippi Goddam” to Motown
Civil Rights movement in biography and memoir
African-American feminism in the civil rights movement
Visual arts and civil rights: from the Spiral Group to Basquiat and Kara Walker
The Civil Rights Movement in African-American satire
Afroturism: The Civil Rights Movement and Speculative Fiction
Writing against race? Contemporary “post-black” literature
Representing the civil rights movement in the media: journalism and photojournalism
Whitewashing the civil rights movement: contemporary political discourses
The Civil Rights movement in Southern literature
The influence of the Civil Rights Movement in other American Equal Rights Campaigns
Black Lives Matter and the legacy of the civil rights movement
Looking from a distance: the international impact of the Civil Rights Movement
The Civil Rights Movement in World Literature
The Civil Rights Movement in Translation
International approaches to teaching the Civil Rights Movement
This conference is organized by the American Intersections Strand of CETAPS
Participants should submit a 250 word abstract by September 8, 2018, accompanied by a brief bio-note.
Inquiries should be emailed to Teresa Botelho (tbotelho@mail.telepac.pt), Isabel Oliveira Martins (iom@netcabo.pt) and Maria Teresa Castilho (mcastilh@letras.up.pt)
Go to http://www.cetaps.com/events/
Registration fees: 60 Euros (full fee)
30 Euros (student fee)
Organizing committee
Teresa Botelho
Isabel Oliveira Martins
Maria Teresa Castilho
Natália Telega Soares
Susana Costa
Jaqueline Pierazzo