acts - cetaps.com · 2018. taking samuel beckett’s waiting for godot as its framework pass over...

Book

of

Ab

stra

cts

Bo

ok

of A

bstra

cts

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

DIKES OF COURAGE:

Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights Movement

and the Aesthetics of Protest

NOVA FCSH, 23 - 24 NOVEMBER 2018

Dikes of Courage – Book of Abstracts

3

Our keynote speakers…

JEANNE THEOHARIS (Distinguished Professor of

Political Science at Brooklyn College of City University of

New York).

Author or co-author of seven books and numerous articles on

the civil rights and Black Power movements, the politics of

race and education, social welfare and civil rights in post-

9/11 America. Her widely-acclaimed biography The

Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks won a 2014 NAACP

Image Award and the Letitia Woods Brown Award from the

Association of Black Women Historians; it appeared on the

New York Times bestseller list and was named one of the 25 Best Academic Titles of 2013

by Choice. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC,

The Nation, Slate, the Atlantic, Boston Review, Salon, the Intercept, and the Chronicle of

Higher Education. Her new book A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and

Misuses of Civil Rights History came out in January from Beacon Press.

ISABEL CALDEIRA (Associate professor of American

Studies at the Faculty of Letters and Senior Research Fellow

of the Center for Social Studies, University of Coimbra,

Portugal).

She teaches American literature and culture at the

undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and Feminist

Studies at the PhD level. Her research fields are African

American Literature and Culture, literatures of the African Diaspora, Inter-American

Studies, Comparative Studies, and Feminist Studies. Among her publications: “‘What

moves at the margin’: Toni Morrison, bell hooks e Ntozake Shange”, The Edge of One of

Many Circles, which she also co-edited (Coimbra: Imprensa da UC, 2017, 140-162);

“Toni Morrison and Edwidge Danticat: Writers-as-Citizens of the African Diaspora”,

Companion to Inter-American Studies, ed. Wilfried Raussert, NY: Routledge, 2017, 207-

218; with Gonçalo Cholant, “Homeland (in)security: African Americans in a ‘Racial

House’ Called America”, Anglo Saxonica III, 14, 2017; “Memory is of the Future:

Tradition and Modernity in Contemporary Novels of Africa and the African Diaspora”,

e-cadernos ces 26 (2016): 68-91; contributed to America Where? 20th-Century

Transatlantic Perspectives (Peter Lang, 2012), which she also co-edited; Translocal

Modernisms: International Perspectives (Peter Lang, 2008); Trans/Oceanic,

Trans/American, Trans/lation: Issues in International American Studies (Cambridge

Scholars, 2009). She is a former President of APEAA and a former member of the Board

of EAAS. She was editor-in-chief of Op.Cit.: Journal of Anglo-American Studies. She is

the President elect of the International Association of Inter-American Studies (IAS/EIA).


5

Day 1 - Friday, November 23, 2018

PANEL 1 - THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT ON SCREEN AND STAGE

Auditorium 1, Tower B 1st Floor

Laughing Matters: Racism, History, and Humor on the Big Screen

Constanze Sabathil,

University of Munich, Germany

It is not only the heightened visibility and media attention to anti-Black violence and

the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement that remind us that the issues at

the very heart of the civil rights struggle are not a thing of the past; films and,

increasingly, TV shows shed a light on both the long history and the continuing

presence of racial injustice in the U.S. Hardly a laughing matter…

Looking at Spike Lee’s ‘BlacKkKlansman’ (2018) and Jordan Peele’s ‘Get Out’

(2017), this presentation will explore how the two films use humor as an aesthetic

strategy, what they laugh at, and to what effect. Does the insertion of comedy, satire,

and hyperbole into narratives of tragedy and social realism only serve as a tool for

comic relief? Or does the juxtaposition of humor and a somber tone predicated on (the

illusion of) historical accuracy and realism increase a sense of urgency and make the

images presented more powerful? We will argue that the humorous, highly

aestheticized rendering of racism and trauma in these films functions not only as a

strategy to make ‘difficult’ topics more palatable to a wider audience, but, more

importantly, their recreation of the past in and for the present moment inspires a deeper

understanding of the ways history informs and determines the present.

Ava Duvernay’s Coretta and Spike Lee’s Malcolm and Black Liberation Theology

from Civil Rights to the Present

Temitope Abisoye Noah,

New York University, USA

Ava Duvernay’s ‘Selma’ (2015) charts a period of the Civil Rights Movement in the

spring of 1965 during which Martin Luther King, Jr. gathered many Americans in

Selma, Alabama, to protest the illegal prohibition of Black Southerners from voting.

Spike Lee’s ‘Malcolm X’ (1992) covers the coming of age of political activist Malcolm

Shabazz, from his childhood days in the American South to his career as a minister of

the Nation of Islam in New York City’s Temple No. 7. In my paper, I suggest that there

is a high degree of intertextuality between Duvernay’s Coretta Scott King and Lee’s

Malcolm X. Particularly when read against the backdrop of the Civil Rights-Black

Power Movement, the developing religious convictions of the two characters illustrate

a similar evolution of Black liberation theology from Civil Rights to the present. Spike

Lee’s Malcolm and Duvernay’s Coretta particularly reveal the syncretism between

Black theology and the Akan Concept of Sankofa, which emphasizes a deference of

one’s ancestors as the sine qua non for Black liberation. I argue that the two film

directors thus create a new brand of a biopic which bids African American viewers into


6

a rigorous personal introspection of their ancestral history. Their art runs in direct

contrast to the traditional biopic, which typically merely fosters in the viewer an

adoration of heroes of the past.

No Longer Waiting: A Call for Equality and Justice

in Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over

Ceylan Ozcan,

Hacettepe University, Turkey

Pass Over, Antoinette Nwandu’s first professional play, debuted in Chicago at the

Steppenwolf Theatre in 2017 and was staged this summer at the Lincoln Center Theater

off-Broadway in New York City. By filming a live performance of the play Spike Lee

made it into a movie, which was screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January

2018. Taking Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot as its framework Pass Over is

Nwandu’s theatrical response to police killings of black men. The play tells the story

of two dispossessed, young black men who live on the street—aptly located on the

corner of Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive and 64th Street—in an unidentified US city.

Taking shifts sleeping Moses and Kitch live in constant fear of being shot dead by the

police. They spend their time bantering and dreaming of passing over to the promised

land—in this case anywhere which can offer them a better life—but remain hopelessly

trapped. This paper will discuss how Nwandu brings together three layers in her play

(the story of the Biblical Exodus, the plantation south, and the Black Lives Matter

movement) to link past and present struggles to achieve freedom and equality. Through

an examination of the mise-en-scéne, language, structure, and themes of the play this

paper will also discuss what and why Pass Over borrows from Beckett and the absurdist

tradition to voice her protest against police brutality, or as Nwandu puts it, “the violent

effects of white oppression on black bodies.”

PANEL 2 – VOICES OF PROTEST

Auditorium 2, Tower B 3rd Floor

The Most Insurgent of Dissenters? An Analysis of Bob Dylan’s Work in the

Early 1960s and his Role within the Protest Movements

Maria Eduarda Vicente

Faculty of Letters, University of Coimbra, Portugal

The United States of America has a long history of non-conformity and insurgency

against the established authority, and music, in particular, has always been a favored

instrument to express displeasure and resistance. The 1960s, as a period of political and

social upheaval, proved to be ideal for the fostering of protest movements that

extensively used songs as a symbol of rebellion and a means of advancing their agenda.

Among those whose material comprised the soundtrack for these protests, Bob Dylan

is arguably the most iconic. Acclaimed as the voice of his peers, Dylan was assigned a

prominent role within the socio-political revolution, with many turning to him for

answers as to how the world could be changed. Dylan, however, rejected such

responsibility and denied all allegiances to any protest movement. Through the analysis

of some of Dylan’s early “protest songs”, this paper explores the songwriter’s evolution


7

from renowned champion of change to self-proclaimed apolitical and how, in doing so,

he might have become the dissenter among rebels.

“We also feel Blue”: The Blues as Protest Music and in the Context of 60s

Protest Movements

Sílvia Nunes


Given that the traditional formula of the Blues has not been subject to many changes

over the last hundred or so years, and that the Blues as we hear it today is recognisably

a form of the music of that name that was first heard in Mississippi at the beginning of

the 20th century, it may sound strange to offer a paper on the Blues in the context of a

conference on protest in the 60s. Very few protest songs could be described as Blues

in the traditional sense. Having said that, it must also be recognised that the Blues was

first and foremost an expression of the African American people, and thus important

for Civil Rights Movements; further, the Blues was the most important source of

inspiration for Rock ‘n’ Roll, the musical genre that was most popular in the 50s, 60s

and 70s and one that included a number of protest songs. Many of the most popular

Rock ‘n’ Roll artists from those decades (for example, the Rolling Stones and Eric

Clapton) covered traditional Blues and these resonated deeply with the youth of that

time. Houston A. Baker Jr. has argued that reducing the Blues to only the expression

of the struggles of the people who gave birth to it, is reducing a form of artistic

expression that goes much beyond that and had so much influence in modern pop

music, such as R&B and Hip Hop. This paper will support and develop Baker’s

contention by looking briefly at the question of origins and at the Blues Revival of the

60s, and will argue that Blues was indeed a form of protest, one that made a significant

contribution to the Protest Music of that time.

Johnny Cash as a Protest Singer: Walking the Line

Alexandra Couto,


Johnny Cash’s prison concerts (which began in the 1950s), his activism on behalf of

Native Americans (he identified himself as a Native American) and his adoption of the

persona of ‘The Man in Black’ establish him as a protest singer and yet he is not usually

described in this way. The identification seems problematic, as do all attempts to

identify or classify Cash and his work. He is a country singer but an ‘outlaw country

singer’. Appropriating the title of one Cash’s best-known songs, “I Walk the Line”

(1956), this paper argues that Cash is a protest singer, and his work more generally can

be understood as a process of ‘walking the line’. ‘Walking the line’ here is deliberately

ambiguous and means obeying the law, following the rules, conforming to norms and

conventions and holding a sometimes precarious balance between alternatives or

opposites, something which necessarily involves a complex series of negotiations and

choices.


8

PLENARY LECTURE I Auditorium 1, Tower B 1st Floor

KEYNOTE SPEAKER - JEANNE THEOHARIS

BROOKLYN COLLEGE OF CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK, USA

A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History

PANEL 3 – LITERARY PATTERNS OF RESISTANCE


The Lives of Haiti’s “People without Shoes” as Universal Black Experience (for

Children): Popo and Fifina (1932), by L. Hughes and A. Bontemps

Rogério Miguel Puga,

Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, New University of Lisbon/CETAPS, Portugal

In 1932 the Harlem Renaissance writers Langston Hughes (1901-1967) and Arna

Bontemps (1902-1973) published the juvenile novel Popo and Fifina, with illustrations

by E. Simms Campbell (1906-1971), an ‘exoticized’ narrative (Smith: 239) that

represents the lifestyle of eight-year-old Popo, eight-year-old Fifina and their parents,

Papa Jean and Mamma Anna, in Haiti, when the peasant family migrates from the hills

to a town by the sea. This paper analyses how the text illustrates the universal black

experience (through experiences and ways of life outside of the USA) for the younger,

and how the African American classic (devoid of overt ideological messages) can

dialogue intertextually (and politically) with Langston Hughes’ “Letter from Haiti”

published in New Masses (July 1931, p. 9) — an organ of the American Communist

Party — to describe the hardships of the “people without shoes” who did not have any

rights in their own land, while criticizing the American military presence in the island

and the corrupt local politicians.

Laying the foundations of black protest: Langston Hughes´s literary

contributions in the Harlem Renaissance

Alba Fernández Alonso,

University of Burgos, Spain

Amidst the intellectuals and writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes

(1902-1967) stands out as a poet, novelist and playwright, and particularly as one of

the primary contributors to this literary movement. In his literary imagery, oppression

and adversity could only be healed by holding to the dreams of a better future. In fact,

the aesthetics of the dream in Hughes is one of the traits inexorably bound to his works

thus becoming centerpiece in his literary career. Given the fact that he was a poet

predetermined not only to be an inhabitant of history, but also an interpreter of it

(Miller, 2015), his refinement into a poet went hand in hand with the development of

social, historical and political circumstances of the time. In view of this, it seems

relevant to believe that the idea of the recurring dream evolved correspondingly. His

utopian reality of an attainable and real dream in his early career years was to be

weakened and almost vanished by the exacerbated racism and blatant injustice endured


9

by African Americans, then transformed into a broken promise, into his “dream

deferred”, to finally reappear with firm determination under a more militant and

revolutionary tone in the Depression years. This paper aims to analyze Hughes´s dream

aesthetics portrayed as a symbol in the struggle of racial equality and empowerment of

the Negro in a modern America in the making. Moreover, the chief purpose of this

presentation is to evince the extent to which Hughes´s work in relation with this

aesthetic helped to lay the foundations of the subsequent black movements of protest,

and the way his legacy imbued the dreams of so many writers advocating change.

Peaceful Protest Through Destructive Literary Patterns: Baraka’s Jazz

Aesthetic in the Midst of the Civil Rights Movement

Panteleimon Tsiokos,

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka’s The Dead Lecturer (1964) collection of poems

constitutes a literary milestone in the way that social and political American history

was intellectually approached and fictionalized. In my paper, I will attempt to monitor

the ways through which the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in the United States of

America enabled the “political to become personal,” and present how individual,

personal histories were transcribed into racial History, by the African American

“minority group” and “sub-culture.” After placing Jone’s work within the necessary

social and literary context of the 1960s, and by closely analyzing the distinctive jazz

specificities and the technical perspectives of some selected poems from the collection,

I will attempt to unveil the diverse ways through which this poetic work confirms the

declaration of its racial independence as it is personally filtered, rationalized and

verbalized by the poet in order to represent a collective voice. In this sense, what Amiri

Baraka is trying to do is to re-approach and reposition himself, personally and racially,

in the United States, as well as capture the whole spectrum of emotional suffering and

the definitive aspect of calling oneself an American of African descent. Lastly, my

research will focus on unveiling the ways through which Baraka expressed and

liberated himself and his penmanship from the literary conventions and the white

supremacy policies of his times, which kept African Americans devoiced, segregated

and at an inherently lower human status, paving the way towards the formulation of

their own ethnically distinct poetic voice and writing.

PANEL 4 - COMPOSITIONS OF PROTEST


Renegades of Funk: Listening to the Long Civil Rights Movement

Alessandro Buffa,

Università degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale", Italy

Building on the scholarship of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker on the multiethnic

and revolutionary Atlantic, Kelley on the Black radical imagination and Nikhil Pal

Singh on the long Civil Rights movement, I posit the music of DJ and hip-hop pioneer

Afrika Bambaataa as part of a global social movement. In the hit song ‘Renegades of


10

Funk’ (1983) Bambataa and his group the Soul Sonic Force imagine a return to the

South Bronx of the early 1980s from outer-space, narrating the history of renegades

who have struggled against colonialism, imperialism, slavery and racism: Thomas

Paine, Chief Sitting Bull, Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X. These struggles were

global in scope and embraced aggrieved people around the globe. ‘Freedom hath been

hunted round the globe…Oh! Receive the fugitive and prepare in time an asylum for

mankind,’ wrote Paine on the eve of the American Revolution. Two centuries later,

when visiting Ghana in 1957, King also touched on the international resonance of his

work: ‘I want you to come to visit us down in Alabama where we are seeking the same

kind of freedom that the Gold Coast is celebrating.’

Every Valley Shall Be Exalted: The Exaltation of Protest to Identity-Building in

Martin Luther King’s use of Handel, The Bible, and the Negro Spirituals

Tamas Demeney,

Budapest Business School, Hungary

I examine the ways in which Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech quotes

and adapts texts of music, creating double and triple layers of intertextuality, and thus

celebrating double and triple layers of belonging and identity. By considering ways in

which he makes use of the Bible, Handel’s Messiah, American patriotic texts, and

Negro Spirituals, we can see how King creates connections to European Christian

culture, American democratic traditions, and African American art at the same time. In

a wonderfully postmodern way, he puts texts to his own service without losing their

original meanings. Moreover, just as these famous grand texts serve his particular aim,

so his great speech delivered at the “greatest demonstration for freedom in the history

of our nation” advances local struggles with postmodern practicality in mind.

By looking at the aesthetics of this speech, I will try to understand its legacy in building

identities. One person, whose identity it helped forming was Alice Walker, who moved

to Mississippi even though it was illegal for her to live there with her white husband.

It was King’s use and re-use of grand narratives that allowed her to embrace her local

and particular identity in the most dangerous place for her on earth. Remembering King

in 2002, Walker said, “Like the feet of Jesus, the eyelashes of the Buddha, all the

children of the earth are perfect.” The legacy of King includes the celebrations of local

and particular identities born out of an understanding of grand narratives.

Contemporary Civil Rights discussions through songs and movies

Edwiges Fernandes,

Pará State University – UEPA, Brazil

Representing the Civil Rights Movement through the big or small screen is certainly

an effective way of highlighting an issue that still represents the fight for justice and

equality today. The United States Civil Rights Movement, which was epitomized by

the acts and words of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, can be used now to

stimulate discussions and reflections on biased attitudes and values that we have been

facing in many parts of the world. This presentation will share the results of using song

and movie activities to open discussions on sensitive topics with a group of first-year,

undergraduate EFL students at the State University of Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon.


11

Besides enhancing the development of intercultural awareness, the activities helped the

students rethink and reconstruct their personal attitudes both in academic and social

interactions by means of audio and visual stimuli that encouraged more fluent speaking

and meaningful writing.

PANEL 5 - #BLACK LIVES MATTER AND THE AESTHETICS OF PROTEST (1)


Disruptive Sounds – The Musical Protest of Childish Gambino, Beyoncé, and

Kendrick Lamar

Joanna King, Sabrine Luttenberger and Joyce Oduwa Osagie,

Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich, Germany

Our paper will focus on the disruptive potential of music in the era of

#BlackLivesMatter by analyzing three examples: Childish Gambino’s “This Is

America” (2018), Beyoncé’s 2016 Super Bowl performance, and Kendrick Lamar’s

“Alright” (2015). Childish Gambino uses music and video imagery as a medium to

disrupt, confront, and challenge attitudes concerning race, social structures, and ideas

that make up American identity. This became particularly evident in his viral music

video “This is America” which critically interrogates contemporary race relations.

Beyoncé chose the 2016 Super Bowl to create a disruptive moment when she and her

dancers performed her song “Formation” in black berets and uniforms reminiscent of

the Black Panthers’ attire. The public outcry following her performance not only

revealed the deep-seated racism in the U.S. society but also created a space for public

discourse on it. Kendrick Lamar explicitly uses his music as a weapon in the fight

against racism and police violence. His politically charged 2016 Grammy performance,

often described as shocking and fearless, is a comment on the unjust treatment and

mass incarceration of Black people as well as a shout-out to BLM. We will argue that

these three case studies illustrate the important role of music for both the internal

dynamics of the current BLM movement and its impact on society. These highly

political, mass-mediated musical disruptions have the power to interfere with

normative cultural perceptions and subvert the notion of a post-racial America.

The Theater of Protest: The Transformative Effect of #BlackLivesMatter

Performances

Dannie Snyder,


Analyzing various #BlackLivesMatter events, this paper and interactive performance

argues for and exemplifies the transformative effect and the power of theatre to inspire

social change, particularly by transforming spectators into what Augusto Boal calls

“spect-actors.” BLM events, following the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and

BARTS, exhibit elements of the theatrical and participatory, such as the use of musical

call and response techniques in street protests. Through the studies of consciously

theatrical performances of dramatized expression and props/costumes that contain

deeper levels of audience interaction, this paper will argue the higher efficacy of the

highly stylized BLM events that allow the spectators an opportunity to actually


12

contribute to the shape of the story. In a second move, taking the forms and techniques

from Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed as its starting point, this paper and interactive

performance will then explore ways for activists to invite spectators to alter staged

images of an oppression, experiment with various methods for overcoming it, and thus

show how theatre performances can serve as “rehearsals for revolution” and how these

tactics can be applied in protest events to maximize their transformative effects.

PANEL 6 – PRACTICES, DISCOURSES, AND CONTROVERSIES


No Protest Baseball... Fewer Africans Americans

Roy Goldblatt,

University of Eastern Finland, Finland

Glaring inequality in the United States, kneeling for the national anthem, outrage at

racism have been clearly visible in American football and basketball arenas, but in

baseball, the sport that broke the color line, it has been non-existent. Having started

streaming and again following my team, the New York Mets, I noticed black faces on

their roster and on the field, but they were Hispanic, but not African American. And

this from a team that cherishes the legacy of Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn

Dodgers.

Baseball had recognized the reduction of African Americans as early as the 1980s and

tried to remedy the situation by creating programs such as the Reviving Baseball in

Inner Cities program. Unfortunately, the percentage of African Americans has not if all

markedly risen. Among the reasons suggested for this lack of participation are the

following:

1. Lack of sandlots and other facilities in urban areas.

2. Parental/role model interest in other sports, i.e. football and basketball.

3. Increase in numbers of Hispanic and Asian players.

4. Field position of players and salaries related to them.

5. Lack of college baseball scholarships and relative insignificance of college

baseball.

6. College basketball and football as instant bridge to professional game as opposed

to longer duration of progression to major league.

In this paper, I will examine some of the reasons espoused as causing this reduction

and comment on them.

From Joltin’ Joe to the Ali Shuffle: Sport, Culture and Politics in the 1960s

Stephen Wilson,


The 1960s are often characterised as a radical epoch. This is not the whole story but it

is useful to see the desire (even the imperative demand) for political change as central


13

to the decade. Protest was one of the most visible and significant manifestations of this

and it impacted all areas of American public life during that decade – including sport.

This last point is worth making explicitly because sport is often regarded as something

apart from everyday concerns such as politics.

“From Joltin’ Joe to the Ali Shuffle: Sport, Culture and Politics in the 1960s” contests

this view and argues that sport is an integral and important part of American public life

and as such is, and has always been, political, or at any rate politicised (think of the

furious search for a ‘great white hope’ after Jack Johnson became the first heavyweight

boxing champion of the world in 1908 and President Trump’s tirades against those

American footballers who ‘take a knee’ during the playing of the national anthem in

protest against police brutality). In 1960s sport reflected and fomented contemporary

social, cultural and political changes. One example of this is the shifting image and

status of the American sporting hero (for instance, Joe DiMaggio and Muhammad Ali).

Also, in the 1960s sport furnished a means of effective political action, of protest. The

Black Power salutes given by Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympic

Games in Mexico City were seen all around the world.

“Dreaded Comparisons” and Borrowed Dreams: The Civil Rights Movement

and the Animal Rights Discourse

Claudia Alonso-Recarte

University of Valencia, Spain

The Animal Rights Movement of the late twentieth and twenty-first century has

modeled much of its identity and discourse on the Civil Rights Movement and its

resistance to institutionalized forms of racism. Although the likening of the plight for

animals to abolitionist struggles can be traced all the way back to the nineteenth-century

animal protection movements in Britain and in America, it was not until the emergence

of the Animal Rights Movement in the mid-late 1970s that the connections between

species and racial otherness was truly explored and substantiated with academic writing

alongside activists’ slogans, images and publicity stunts drenched in metaphors,

metonymies, similes, and other rhetorical devices that strengthened the comparison.

The aim of this presentation is to examine and illustrate how the Civil Rights discourse,

Martin Luther King, Jr., civil disobedience, and direct action have seeped deep within

the frameworks of animal liberation. Through this effort to assimilate and appropriate

the discourse, techniques, and strategies of the racial counterculture of the Civil Rights

Movement, animal rights and liberation expose how nonhuman otherness is but a

cultural category that fortifies white male supremacy. By discussing the leading images

and arguments that connect the two struggles, I aim to present not only a historiographic

recollection of how these communities of activists crafted and solidified their self-

awareness as resistance groups, but also to initiate a debate regarding the ethics of the

comparison between racial and nonhuman otherness itself, which even decades after

the publication of Marjorie Spiegel’s The Dreaded Comparison (1988) remains very

controversial.

PANEL 7 – SUBVERSIVE LITERARY AESTHETICS



14

Subversive Irony: Reconfiguring the African American Satirical Tradition in

Percival Everett’s Erasure

Teresa Botelho,


Studies on the African American satirical tradition have consistently pointed out how

the vitality of this mode of social and political critique has been frequently neglected,

reflecting a perhaps unintended privileging of the tropes of realist fiction. But as Darryl

Dickson-Carr argues, in African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel (2001),

satire has always shaped discourses of resistance that can be traced as far back as the

emergence of the antebellum encoded language of indirectness. The subversive power

of satire to deconstruct relations of power, stereotyping and cultural assumptions

underlying racial categorizations was amply demonstrated during the Harlem

Renaissance in works by Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes and in the iconoclastic

reductio ad absurdum parody Black No More, by George Schuyler. This tradition

survived in the following decades, but during the 1960s and early 70s, a tension

between the aesthetic priorities of the Black Arts Movement and the irreverent work of

satirists like Ishmael Reed and Cecil Brown exposed a gap between authors sharing the

same general objective but diverging in terms of the boundaries between appropriate

and unseemly fictional protocols.

This debate has shifted with the rebirth of satire as a favored discursive field for writers

who are awkwardly grouped under the post-black descriptor, but which differ greatly

in terms of conceptual strategies. This paper discusses one of the most complex and

vital examples of these new reconfigurations, the novel Erasure (2001), by Percival

Everett, and discusses its investment in the tropes of postmodern, degenerative mode

of satire to interrogate and subvert the language and the assumptions that mediate and

construct mainstream demeaning public discourses of blackness.

History, Myth, Fantasy, and Representation in Colson Whitehead’s The

Underground Railroad

Liliana Costa Santos,


The Underground Railroad (UGRR) is probably one of the most prolific tropes of

American culture and literature. Even though the most recent depictions of the UGRR

are all very different from one another, they encourage one to think: how does the

representation of the late 19th century American society influence one’s current

sociocultural and economic perspectives? Which and whose (hi)story do we (choose

to) remember?

Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel The Underground Railroad is considered a neo-slave

narrative which plays with historical evidence, myths and timelines in a remarkably

fresh way and this constitutes the book’s signature mark. It allows one to read, interpret

and mold the story of an alternate version of the United States without ever losing sight

of the real – past, and contemporary – circumstances of the country, from slavery to

Jim Crow laws, to the recent events that triggered the Black Lives Matter movement.

But amidst the author’s artistic license, lies also the hypothetical. As Vásquez states,

the novel “(…) doesn’t merely tell us about what happened; it also tells us what might

have happened”.


15

The main focus of this paper will be on these creative and, therefore, malleable aspects

– history, myth, fantasy, and representation – in Colson Whitehead’s latest novel, The

Underground Railroad, and how they may contribute to understand the present

moment.

Rereading Cain, Abel, and Martin Luther King Jr. in Charles Johnson's

Dreamer

Paul Tewkesbury,

Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea

My paper critiques Charles Johnson’s representation of Martin Luther King Jr. and

his philosophy in the 1998 novel Dreamer, which is set during King’s 1966 Chicago

campaign. In Dreamer, Johnson creates the character Chaym Smith as a

doppelganger to King. Because Chaym physically resembles King, he is hired to

serve as the minister’s double at public appearances. Unlike King, however, Chaym

hails from the Chicago projects, uses heroin, and is suspected of murdering his former

girlfriend and her children. Johnson’s pairing of dissimilar characters allows him to

explore the social and economic inequality and injustice that the historical King was

attacking in Chicago. However, Dreamer’s success is ultimately constrained by the

Cain and Abel pairing that Johnson imposes on the narrative. Johnson’s allusive use

of the biblical story works, to some extent, as a starting point for a meditation on the

roots of inequality and injustice. Nevertheless, the Cain and Abel framework is

problematic in a King-themed novel for two reasons. First, the biblical account, in

which God inexplicably favors Abel over Cain, fails to accord with the historical

King’s conception of a just, loving God. Second, the biblical account suggests that

inequality has its origins in God and is an immutable part of human existence.

Although Dreamer implies a need for the radical restructuring of American society,

Chaym mysteriously disappears at the end, and the structural evils that create such a

figure remain intact, as firmly embedded in American society as God’s arbitrary

disfavor against Cain is embedded in Genesis.

The Representation of Protest in The Hate U Give By Angie Thomas

Gonçalo Cholant,


“What’s the point of having a voice if you’re gonna be silent in those moments you

shouldn’t be?” Racial profiling and police brutality are realities that seem to be

inescapable for racialized subjects in contemporary United States, as countless

episodes of blatant inequality fill the news every day. Angie Thomas deals with this

theme in her novel The Hate U Give, published in 2017, as her protagonist faces firstly

an episode of “driving while black”, resulting in the killing of her friend by a police

officer, and the subsequent development of this injustice in her community. Living a

sheltered life as she attends a private school, in which she is the only black student, the

protagonist must deal with this split consciousness, as she experiences two universes

that seem to be completely separate. The episode of police brutality shatters the split

screen reality she inhabits, forcing the protagonist to reckon with the disparities that

are embedded in being American and black. The Black Lives Matter Movement is a


16

key element in this construction, as protests across the town are organized, denouncing

the structural racism that is inherent to the justice system. In addition to this, Thomas

is also able to demonstrate the dynamics and the logic that can transform a peaceful

demonstration into a riot.

Day 2 - Saturday, November 24, 2018

PANEL 8 – PHOTOGRAPHING THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT


Reading Visual Representations of the Black Lives Matter movement

Maria José Canelo,

Center for Social Studies / Faculty of Letters, University of Coimbra, Portugal

The connection between the Civil Rights (CRM) and the Black Lives Matter (BLM)

movements has been widely debated, being assumed by some and contested by others.

One of the claims of the BLM itself is that it is seeking to go beyond the legacy of civil

rights and struggling for a recognition of the humanity of the African American people.

This paper explores this idea by analysing photographs and the representations of the

movement they deploy. By applying notions of visuality and countervisuality (Mirzoeff

2011) to analyse the representations, I expect to demonstrate how the aesthetics of

protest associated to the BLM goes beyond contestation and resistance to situations of

injustice and suffering, to ultimately claim the right to look and how this is connected

to a claim to humanity. I will further discuss how the right to look suggests forms of

engagement with the real, namely of visualizing the real, that entail a claim to a political

agency that was absent in the official visual representations of the CRM. My point is

not to deny the legacy of CRM’s ideals in the present CRM, but to signal how visual

representations contribute to define some fundamental differences.

Representation, Identity, and Power in Civil Rights Photography

Sheila Brannigan,

Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, New University of Lisbon, Portugal

In what ways do photographs of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s manifest and

enable power relations? In these photographs, which experiences are accorded value?

Who is represented? How are they represented?

The constructed aspect of photographs of this movement for equal rights will be

analysed, investigating the discourses concerning representation, identity, and power

in which these images are embedded. Analysing photographs from the Civil Rights


17

Movement as representations of the imaging of conflict will challenge readings of the

images as impartial records, considering what Foucault terms the “regimes of truth”

around the photographs.

Capturing the Moment, Picturing the Legacy: The Scurlock Studio, African

American Identity, and Civil Rights

Susana Costa,


Ever since the early years of photography, African American studios have helped create

a sense of collective cultural memory and legacy that has been weaved within visual

narratives of both belonging and protest. With an emphasis on concepts of community,

self-representation and the photographic archive, this paper revisits the groundbreaking

work of early African American studio photographers and analyses in detail the success

of Addison Scurlock and his sons, George and Robert Scurlock, who operated a studio

in Washington DC throughout most of the twentieth century. The Scurlock studio will

be set as an example for all other studios emerging in African American communities

nationwide. Fueled by an impetus of African American citizens to have their portraits

taken, this studio rendered as visible the African American community as a whole.

Between art and activism, the collective and the individual, the Scurlocks captured the

harsh realities of African American life in the nation’s capital city, but they still

privileged prosperity over misery, promise over hopelessness. The Scurlock archive

holds, for instance, several images of the highest African American dignitaries, Dr.

Martin Luther King included. Still, aware of all social changes taking place, Robert

Scurlock would also be one of the first photographers to roam the streets to capture the

protests that followed Dr. King’s assassination. This paper will discuss the coexistence

of images of belonging and resistance in the studio’s archive as a reflection of specific

moments in African American history.

PANEL 9 – RAINBOWS OF PROTEST

Auditorium 3, Tower B 5th Floor

'We were lout, we were out there': Chicana and Black women's coalition for

welfare rights in the civil rights era

Alejandra Marchevsky,

California State University, USA

This paper examines the multi-racial coalition for “welfare rights” in Los Angeles,

California, between 1959 and 1973. During this period, Los Angeles was home to a

militant economic justice movement that pushed for a guaranteed annual income, job

training, and publicly subsidized childcare, among other demands. The movement’s

leaders and rank-and-file activists were African American and Mexican American

women who found common cause as poor single mothers fighting for dignity and

security within a hostile system of government assistance. The history of this

movement centers women of color as targets of racialized patriarchal state violence,

and powerful thinkers and actors who crafted a class-centered, anti-racist feminist

politics. It challenges the “silo approach” that predominates in the civil rights


18

historiography, where each ethnic group has a separate story. Declension narratives

cast the rise of racial nationalism in the late 1960s with intensified competition between

African Americans and Chicanos for political prominence and limited state resources.

My research argues that if we focus on grassroots organizing by black and Chicana

women, we see different cultural identities and political priorities existing alongside

sustained solidarity and cooperation. Though experienced through different cultural

lenses, black and Chicana activists shared similar commitments to racial pride and

conceptions of freedom that included women of color’s sexual and economic

autonomy. Focusing on poor women of color’s shared quest for self-determination, this

history expands our understanding of the influence, exchange, and cooperation between

the African American and Chicano/a freedom struggles, and points to possibilities for

multi-racial coalition building today.

Literature and the Gay Liberation Movement

Ewa Scibior,

University of Warsaw, Poland

The revolutionary spirit of the 1960s gave rise to multiple social movements, including

one for gay rights, with Stonewall riots of June 1969 as the event which brought the

issue to the public attention. All social movements had similar goals of emphasizing

oppression and fighting for equal rights. Gay people, however, had to overcome another

obstacle, generally not encountered by members of racial minorities - because they

usually kept their identity a secret due to fear of persecution (and prosecution), and

were socialized into a heterosexual society, they often knew no one who shared their

struggles. This is why one of the first goals of gay rights activists was to create a sense

of community among gay people, and a way of achieving that was, among others,

through literature.

I intend to look at two books which were among the most popular 1970s gay novels -

Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City and Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance

(both published in 1978). I am going to analyze the way the two authors use gay

folklore as a way to, on the one hand, create a sense of belonging among gay men who

are already a part of the in-crowd, and on the other to welcome newcomers and ease

their way into the community. The two novels use very similar tactics, but I also want

to look into possible differences which arise from the difference in their intended

audience, Maupin’s story being written with both homosexual and heterosexual readers

in mind.

Visibility/Invisibility: The Asian American public and political experience in

Chang Rae-Lee’s Native Speaker

Joana Marques,


Asian-American literature has been reflecting on issues of political and social visibility/

invisibility that stem from the marginalization of the Asian American identity in the

United States. This wave owes much to the African American path in the context of the

Civil Rights, which influenced the Asian American community to also claim and

defend its social, cultural and political statement in America. In order to describe this


19

new context, novels such as Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker were edited to raise issues

regarding the formal and informal blockages to visibility and power suffered by the

Asian American community. In this process, language plays a very important role, on

which the progression from the private to the public sphere will depend, especially

considering access to power and political agenda.

In Lee's novel, the character of Korean-American politician John Kwang is symbolic

of this desire for political representation of a minority, which is not only Korean

American or Asian American, but appeals to the solidarity among marginalized

minorities, going further in the white/black binary racial politics associated with Civil

Rights.

However, the dream of change at the political level, namely bringing minorities from

invisibility to public and political representation, turns out to be a failure. The novel

ends with the destruction of Kwang's political career by another Korean-American,

Henry Park, a spy who specializes in reporting suspicious activities performed by

immigrants and foreigners. The fear of an Asian invasion in the white WASP America

is controlled and stopped by someone from the marginalized community itself,

reflecting an internalization of prejudice: the' self-hate 'enunciated in Kwang's speech

(Lee, 149), and the Henry’s “ugly immigrants’ truth"(Lee, 319).

PLENARY LECTURE II


KEYNOTE SPEAKER – ISABEL CALDEIRA

Center for Social Studies, Faculty of Letters, University of Coimbra, Portugal

“Do We Ever Wonder if black men dream?” Representations of Martin Luther King

in Literature

PANEL 10 #BLACKLIVESMATTER AND THE AESTHETICS OF PROTEST (II)


“... Or Does It Explode?” – Art, Activism, and the Black Lives Matter

Movement

Sophia Hörl and Stephanie Matthias,


Our paper will explore four representatives of the contemporary African American

art(ivism) scene, focusing on the function of visual art in the era of #BlackLivesMatter.

Photographer Devin Allen’s work A Beautiful Ghetto captures and interprets the

Baltimore protests after the death of Freddie Gray in 2015. Baltimore-based artist Shan

Wallace's “I Love Being Black” reveals everyday racism and inequalities in the life of

black Americans. Sculpture and performance artist Dread Scott effectively connects

past and present in his artwork “A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday,” his

installation “Or Does It Explode?,” and his performance “On the Impossibility of

Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide.” While touching on pressing

issues such as police brutality, Theaster Gates' “Minority Majority” installation literally

turns reality into art by utilizing fire hoses from protest marches.


20

Examining these four artists’ works, we will explore the dynamics of art as protest and

the aesthetic frames used by the artists to voice their criticism. What is the function of

visual art in social movements in general and the Black Lives Matter movement in

particular? What are the dynamics between the movement and its artists? Is artivism an

effective means of resistance? Our presentation will analyze the political and societal

effects of the selected artworks and connect them to aesthetic practices of the long civil

rights movement, framing visual art as a powerful tool to express political dissent

beyond traditional forms of protest.

Is Orange the New Black (Lives Matter)? Police Brutality and Judicial Injustice

on TV

Milica Cortonavacki and Melina Haberl,


Throughout its six seasons, the Netflix hit TV show ‘Orange Is the New Black’

(OITNB) has depicted the U.S. prison system as brutal and racialized. With the rise of

the Black Lives Matter movement and the increased media attention to racially

motivated police brutality in the U.S., BLM entered the narrative of OITNB in season

4, both as a direct reference and as a framework for the depiction of the institutional

racism of the U.S. judicial system. Focusing on the fate of two inmates, Poussey and

Taystee, this paper will investigate how BLM, its tactics, and its politics are represented

in the show, in the storyline and the narrative structure. Poussey’s tragic death by

suffocation, the ensuing peaceful protest with a violent ending, and the unfair treatment

of Taystee in the justice system are a clear reference to the brutal killings of black men

and women at the hands of white police officers and the actions and tactics of BLM;

the ambiguity with which OITNB treats these events, however, remains problematic.

In this paper, we will analyze these two storylines to ask whether the politics in the

show and its effects, i.e. the politics of the show, are necessarily one and the same.

And, on a more general level, we’ll question whether a TV show can be – and if OITNB

is – a tool of resistance and for raising awareness; or, as critics have suggested, whether

OITNB is just another example of the exploitation of black trauma for white

entertainment.

PANEL 11 – LEGACIES: PAST TO PRESENT Auditorium 3, Tower B 5th Floor

Tying Past to Present: The Legacy of the Emmett Till Case in the Black Lives

Matter Era

Martin Fernandez Fernandez

University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain

This paper explores the legacy of the Emmett Till case as one of the core elements

which binds together the Civil Rights Movement and the current Black Lives Matter in

the USA. The recent reopening of the case by the Federal Government in July 2018

evinces the crucial relevance of the tragic story of the fourteen-year-old African

American boy in the historical debate for social justice in the country. Donald Trump’s

inauguration in January 2017 has magnified the escalating racial tension of the past


21

years and has, at the same time, fueled several forms of activism across the USA. BLM

has been working to channel the outrage and frustration of the African American

community into an organized tide that fights against the myriad facets of white

supremacy. Founded in 2013, one of the association’s former pillars revolved around

the struggle against police brutality towards the black community and, in particular,

towards a much more vulnerable social group: African American youths. The

assassination of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin by white vigilante George

Zimmerman in 2012 stirred the race question in the country as the Emmett Till lynching

had somehow done fifty-seven years before. At the dawn of the CRM, the complex

relations between race, class, and gender in the US South helped to set the atmosphere

for one of the starkest assassinations in the history of the country and it seems that

recent violent events—i.e. Charlottesville rally—resuscitate the latent supremacist

phantasms of one of the world’s most potent democracies.

The roots and legacy of the American Civil Rights Act of 1964

Ayman Al Sharafat,

Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary

This paper provides a historical review of the origins and legacy of the 1964 Civil

Rights Act through the lens of the African American Civil Rights and the Women’s

Rights Movements. Without an understanding of the historical development and

consequences of the Civil Rights Act, it is easy to lose sight of how the act has shaped

the understanding of equality in the American workforce. Further, the way in which

rights movements evolved alongside each other illuminates a need to focus not only on

equality between majority and minority groups but also on issues of equality among

minority groups. The historical narrative will be developed using political,

psychological, historical, and legal source material. While the Civil Rights Act did not

immediately change the landscape of equality in the American workplace, it signaled a

fundamental shift in the treatment of racial and gender diversity. In concert with other

social, legal, and political shifts, it paved the way for progress on issues like affirmative

action, pregnancy discrimination, and sexual harassment. Previous reviews of the Civil

Rights Act and rights movements tend to focus narrowly on one issue or group and

approach that concern from a single academic discipline. In contrast, we will provide

a review of the roots and consequences of the Civil Rights Act based on the

developments of two rights movements, and draw from sources in psychology, history,

political science, and legal perspectives to provide a broader picture of this landmark

legislation.

Men on the Margins: Civil Rights Husbands and the Black Freedom Movement

as Family Affair

Francis Gourrier,

Kenyon College, USA

This paper examines the activism of a group of men that I call “civil rights husbands.”

Civil rights husbands were married to women leaders of the black freedom movement.

They had less prominent roles in the movement than their more visible wives. In some

scholarship, these men were understood as marginal figures who had not been involved


22

in the movement but merely witnessed it up close. Here, I challenge that assertion by

framing the sacrifices of civil rights husbands and their domestic responsibilities as

political activism. This analysis breaks down rigid definitions of civil rights activism

and offers a different model of manhood in the movement—one that is not

characterized by what historian Steve Estes refers to as “masculinist uplift.”

Civil rights leaders are often taken out of their familial context. This paper, then,

challenges those interested in the civil rights movement to rethink what it meant for

extraordinary individuals like Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm, and Rosa Parks to

engage in collective struggle. Their husbands—Perry “Pap” Hamer, Conrad Chisholm,

and Raymond Parks—significantly shaped their wives’ political contributions as

partners in the struggle. This history reminds us that the civil rights movement, in many

ways, was indeed a family affair.

PANEL 12 – WOMEN’S VOICES


Unpacking Memory in Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’

Isabel Oliveira Martins,


“Recitatif” (1983) was first published in Confirmation: An Anthology of African

American Women, edited by Amiri and Amina Baraka, and subsequently reprinted in

Skin Deep: Black Women and White Women Write about Race (1992). “Recitatif” has

gathered relevant criticism, largely centered on the most obvious theme of Toni

Morrison’s only short story written to date – the racial indeterminacy of the two main

characters, Twyla, the narrator, and Roberta. However, the narrative, which follows

both girls since they were left at St. Bonny’s orphanage by their mothers and through

a series of meetings during their adulthood, is also about memory.

They try to fill in the gaps, recreating and reinterpreting their memories and through

this sharing, both women seem to be able to finally understand and accept their own

present lives and to establish their own identity. Memory and female friendship,

regardless of race, function as self-help therapy. Morrison herself views memory and

recollecting as important when writing, as she stated in “The Site of Memory” that

“‘memories within’ are the subsoil of my work” (302).

Thus, memory is not only important in this short story, but I would argue it is

fundamental when writing about the African American situation in the United States.

What Morrison has coined as ‘national amnesia’, the state where people, whatever their

race, tend to repress their painful memories, is deconstructed in this story and a possible

understanding is put forward.

Black Revolutionary Body Under Assault: Reclaiming Humanity and Freedom in

Assata Shakur’s Assata: An Autobiography

Natalia Telega-Soares,



23

Assata Shakur, a former Black Panther Party member included on the FBI’s “most

wanted” list, was imprisoned and tried for numerous crimes, including the assassination

of a state trooper. Seeking exile in Cuba (where she is still currently), she wrote her

autobiography Assata: An Autobiography in 1988. She is one of only three female

members of the BPP who penned full-length autobiographies (the other two being

Angela Davis with An Autobiography (1974) and Elaine Brown’s The Taste of Power

(1992)). All three publications belong to the tradition of Black Power narratives and

their objective to denounce endemic racism in America and state oppressive tactics to

destroy the Black Liberation Movement, as well as counter the master narrative on

African American history, Black Power ideals, goals and strategies. However,

narratives written by female Black Panther members have yet another goal: to render

women’s contribution to Black revolution visible and free of political and cultural

distortions. According to Ericka Huggins (in Phillips, 2015), there has been much

silence around women revolutionaries as their own voices are distorted by the media,

political and judicial discourse and a negative cultural approach. For this reason,

personal narratives are of utmost importance as they challenge the official hegemonic

discourse and open space to personal experiences which, in the turbulent decades of

the 1960s and 1970s, became entangled in politics and history. The aim of this paper is

to examine Assata Shakur’s autobiography in order to better understand which

narrative strategies she used to defend her humanity and her corporeality against

oppressive tactics from racist systems of social control. Bearing in mind that she was

incarcerated in inhumane conditions for months, it is of interest to read her story as a

quest for both bodily and mental freedom. This paper will contribute to an ongoing

scholarship on the Black Power Movement in America in the 1960s and 1970s and,

particularly, to women’s participation in the movement.

Women's Voices in the Civil Rights Movement and After: Reading Alice Walker's

Short Stories

Biljana Oklopcic,

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Osijek, Croatia

In the last twenty-five years, there has been a significant rise in scholarship on women’s

participation in the Civil Rights Movement, persuasively demonstrating that women

were not marginal figures but the force the Movement rested on. Through the intricate,

intimate and often anonymous network, those freedom daughters, bridge leaders or

“silent observers” initiated, organized, and sustained the Civil Rights Movement,

revealing, in the process, the sources of their strength/inspiration as well as the issues

they had to face in their (post-)civil rights activism. While women activists found their

strength/inspiration in the reliance on each other regardless of skin color, age or social

status, in the reliance on family, community and pioneering women who helped pave

their way, and the emerging gendered consciousness, their involvement in the Civil

Rights Movement and the post-civil rights era activities also testifies to the issues they

had to cope with such as the gender violence, the unrecognized involvement in the

everyday maintenance of the Movement, the critique of the Movement sexism, the

challenges of local white and black intransigence, and the personal sacrifices each

woman made.

This paper would thus attempt to explore how Alice Walker, a Southern writer,

feminist, and a civil rights activist herself, reflects on women’s involvement, or the lack

of it, in both the Civil Rights Movement and the post-civil rights era in her fiction. By


24

reading Walker’s short stories “Everyday Use” (1973), “Nineteen Fifty-Five” (1981)

and “Advancing Luna – and Ida B. Wells” (1981), the paper would show how, to

paraphrase William Faulkner, the actual is mirrored in the apocryphal, i.e. how the

narrative space of Walker’s stories (de)constructs the factual, offering a different

insight on women’s role in the Movement, tackling the Movement issues rarely

addressed, and giving voice to those perceived as standing off to the side – women.

Putting Up Resistance Through Interracial Friendships: Sherley Anne Williams’

Dessa Rose (1990) and Ellen Douglas’ Can’t Quit You Baby (1988)

Leticia García Barreiro,

University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain

The aim of this paper is to analyze the interracial friendships portrayed in Sherley Anne

Williams’ neo-slave narrative Dessa Rose (1990) and Ellen Douglas’ Can’t Quit You

Baby (1988). The bonds established through this type of relationships constitute a safe

space of resistance that help women to obtain self-definition and empowerment.

Trespassing the racial line, the black and white women protagonists of both novels

experience a series of events that lead them to identify with the other out of a shared

sense of oppression. This identification triggers a dialogue between black and white

women that has an impact on their individual consciousness where this reliance on each

other, as Nancy Cott explained, “embodied a new kind of group consciousness, one

which could develop into a political consciousness” (1977,194).

Interracial friendships allow women to create something else to be, becoming in this

way, an act of rebellion through which to question the ideology of race relations in

America opening up debates for the intersectionality of the politics of identity and the

current situation of race relations in America.

In conclusion, these narratives constitute part of the revolutionary discourse of the Civil

Rights movement, offering a counterrepresentation of slavery and fostering a new

relationship between art and activism where the text becomes a safe space from where

to reclaim the self in an attempt to reconfigure the social realm and contribute to the

rewriting of slavery.

PANEL 13 – DISCOURSES ON ACTIVISM Auditorium 3, Tower B 5th Floor

“The royal fellowship of death”: James Baldwin’s Views on Race and Power in

America

Diana Almeida,

Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon/CEAUL-ULICES, Portugal

In February 1961, James Baldwin (1924-1987) published a quite long article in

Harper’s Magazine entitled “The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King,” where

he described his few meetings with the Baptist Minister and outlined his perspective

on African American resistance. Through a detailed rendering of personal

circumstances that testifies to the importance of autobiography in US culture, Baldwin

underlines the spiritual strength of the Civil Rights leader (that would be assassinated

seven years later). Furthermore, he emphasized his belief that only through individual


25

commitment would it be possible to change the race relations in the US, thus grounding

politics in the private domain. This paper will propose a dialogue with the Oscar-

nominated documentary ‘I Am Not Your Negro’ (2016), directed by Raoul Peck, in

order to question the contemporary validity of Baldwin’s comments on race and to

examine the high death-rate that the African-American community is still subjected to

nowadays in the US.

Lived History: Race and Rights in Richard Power’s The Time of Our Singing

Horst Tonn,

University of Tuebingen, Germany

In this paper, I will examine the dense interactions and resonances between history and

the fictional characters in Richard Powers’ novel The Time of Our Singing (2003). The

historical frame of the novel extends from the momentous Marian Anderson concert in

Washington, D.C., in 1939 to the “Million Man March” in 1995. David Strom, a

Holocaust survivor, and Delia Daley, the daughter of a Black doctor in Philadelphia,

meet at the Marian Anderson concert and get married. For their family David and Delia

hope for a future “beyond race” – a hope which quickly gets crushed by the persistence

of the blatantly obvious as well as subtle mechanisms of racism, disfranchisement, and

violence in the postwar United States.

Clearly, Powers’ novel complicates notions of history that assume progress, linearity

and a will towards national unity. It rejects dominant narratives which cast the civil

rights movement either as triumphant or as tragic decline. Instead, the novel seems to

dovetail in important ways with Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s concept of the “Long Civil

Rights Movement.” Further, the relationship between fictional characters and history

is complex. Characters are neither fully free agents nor determined victims of historical

forces. Instead, the novel invites us to consider the possible range and capabilities of

human agency as they are confined and/or energized by history. And finally, The Time

of Our Singing unravels the intricate interactions between affect and cognitive

structures, norms and moral commitments, belief systems and political ideologies.

Afro-Past, Afro-Present, Afro-Future - Spirits of the Civil Rights Movement

F. Angelo Camufingo,

University of Potsdam, Germany

The Civil Rights Movement stood for equal rights, social, political and legal changes.

Preceded by numerous fights for literal humanness, African Americans uprose to tell

their history and to remember. They stressed the discrimination they faced and

organized to highlight and work against social injustices. People pleaded and hoped for

a better future, dreamed of a future.

Black Lives Matter is often seen as one of the most prominent examples of the

continuous effects of the movement. People are still speaking up, organize, protest and

fight. Coretta Scott King said that “struggle is a never ending process“ and I often asked

myself if then we will constantly be protesting for a different future. But what counts

as protest, as activism, as resistance?


26

As an artist, I tried to find an answer to these questions through art itself. I turned to

the aesthetics of Afrofuturism and started to ask myself what the future that Black

people are fighting for looks like. Is the future already “owned”?

Afrofuturism is generally based on the interplay of art, Afrodiasporic experience and

science fiction. There are a number of definitions that point to the openness of the

concept, such as that of Ingrid LaFleur, who “generally defines Afrofuturism as a way

of imagining possible futures through a black cultural lens” (Womack 9), or that of

Ytasha Womack, who states that it “redefine[s] culture and notions of blackness for

today and the future” (9). In this paper, I want to point out the influence of The Civil

Right Movement on today’s activism and how also aesthetics, such as Afrofuturism,

can be seen as a continuation of the movement, its importance and its widening of the

idea of activist practice.

PANEL 14 – AFRICAN AMERICAN SPECULATIVE FICTION


“I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery”: Strategies

of Sensitization in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred

Beatriz Almeida Santos,


Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred follows Dana, a young African American woman who

finds herself thrust back in time to the Antebellum South. Alongside her, the reader is

transported into a hotspot of blood and gore, bringing him/her closer to the emotional

(instead of political) effects of racism and slavery in an attempt to counteract the

contemporary desensitization on the subject. Butler employs this strategy by bringing

the reader closer to the reality of the lives of slaves instead of sticking to political

narratives on the same topic. This paper aims to show how the usage of emotional

distress and graphic imagery proves to be highly effective in making the reader care,

on a personal level, about what s/he is reading by making him/her uncomfortable with

what is being portraited and consequently, triggering an emotional response.

What Future for Orogenes? Building a Brighter World for African-Americans in

N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy

Rui Mateus,


N. K. Jemisin, an African American author of speculative fiction, brings forth in her

Broken Earth trilogy the story of a woman with a quest to find her kidnapped daughter.

In a land that is constantly ravaged by earthquakes and disaster, a cultural conflict

between orogenes (people who can sense and control the movements of the Earth) and

stills (those who cannot) takes place. This conflict, thousands of years old, is

aggravated by stonelore, a philosophy of hate towards the “roggas”, a derogatory term

for orogenes. These are often persecuted and killed, and those who are found and taught

to maintain proper control are often treated with contempt and disrespect.

Exploring various themes within Afrofuturism, the novels focus on the alienation and

attempt at the inclusion of orogenes. Throughout the books, there is a struggle to end


27

the hate towards the “roggas” and to place them in equal terms with the stills. This is

the ultimate goal of the trilogy. A feminist approach to the story also shows how strong

female characters can be autonomous and control their own lives.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the cultural clash between orogenes and stills and

how it motivates an attempt to change the land and, hopefully, end the persecution of

the so hated “roggas”. It will be seen how Afrofuturist ideas play an important part in

envisioning a brighter future for black people, not only among orogenes, but also

among the stills.

Flight to Canada: Ishmael Reed's Reclamation of African American Power

through Satire

Jéssica Fortunato,


In the very first chapter of Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed tells the reader about Harriet

Beecher Stowe, the white author who used a slave’s life story to write the very

controversial novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin but was later ridiculed for it in several plays

and minstrel shows. Flight to Canada is Reed’s attempt to follow this example and

retrieve the power taken from African Americans throughout time by not only

ridiculing slavery but also antebellum nostalgia and even the, often constricting, rules

of the traditional slave narrative.

This paper will explore Reed’s use of satirical elements, as well as his purposeful

disregard of historical accuracy, to highlight the struggles of African Americans while

stepping away from conventional tales of slavery and into what he named the “neo-

slave narrative”. It will also attempt to connect the events of the American Civil War

depicted in the book with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s, as well as with

more recent campaigns such as “Black Lives Matter”

PANEL 15 – GLOBAL INFLUENCES OF THE CIVIL MOVEMENT

Auditorium 3, Tower B 5th Floor

Martin Luther King and Polish Drama - Forefather's Eve by Adam Mickiewicz

Mateusz Kucab,

Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland

If we want to talk about Polish literature, there is no possibility not to mention one of

the greatest romantic dramas - Forefather's Eve by Adam Mickiewicz. The monologue,

presented in the play (Konrad's monologue) is fundamental for the Polish culture,

presenting the problems of freedom and human independence. This paper will be

devoted to the well-known adaptation of the play directed by Radoslaw Rychcik. In

this adaptation, Polish nation (people who have no country, because of three partitions)

are presented as a black nation fighting for their rights (and Konrad's monologue has

been changed into Martin Luther King's speech “I have a dream”). I will analyze

selected scenes, describing the mechanism used to demonstrate the universal need for

human rights.


28

Learning Blackness in America: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Alice Carletto,


I wasn’t black until I came to America. I became black in America.” This is what the

well-known Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie stated in an interview. The

same happened with Ifemelu, the protagonist of one of her most famous novels:

Americanah (2013). Thanks to a fellowship, Ifemelu has the opportunity to move to

America and it is there that she experiences to be black, and, moreover, she learns that

“to be black in America meant something”. The aim of this paper is to show that in

21st Century America there are still racial and color issues. Despite the struggles and

the civil rights movement, there are still some assumptions, stereotypes, and

misconceptions that seem to be almost unavoidable. This paper will attempt to briefly

describe these elements through the analysis of the novel Americanah.

acts - cetaps.com · 2018. taking samuel beckett’s waiting for godot as its framework pass over...

Documents