CFP: DIKES OF COURAGE: MARTIN LUTHER KING, THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT AND THE AESTHETICS OF PROTEST
23/24 November 2018
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Nova University of Lisbon
Fifty years 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 conference invites reflections on the representation of the Civil Rights movement not only in American historiography, public and media discourses but in literature, visual culture, filmic, musical and televisual texts produced in the last fifty years. It encourages an approach that goes beyond the understanding of these texts as artifacts that produce social memory, to ask how they illuminate debates about the aesthetics of protest, the relationship between activism and art, the collective and the personal, the politics of identity and intergenerational remembering. It also welcomes approaches that identify the networks between pasts and presents, following Ashraf Rushdy’s concept, in Remembering Generations (2001), of African-American cultural texts constituting a palimpsest where what has happened in other space and time becomes experientially available, examining both the creative dialogues between the civil rights movement artists and their predecessors of the Harlem Renaissance and beyond, and the aesthetical frames used by the contemporary generations of “post-black” artists and writers to invoke and reimagine that legacy. It is also interested in comparative approaches that explore the influence of the African-American civil rights praxis and aesthetics of protest in other campaigns for equality that emerged during and after the 1960s namely Native-American, Asian-American, Latino/a and LGBTQ movements.
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/dikesofcourage for more information and submission of abstracts.
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