Historically, Enlightenment ideas, which have been traditionally cast as the originator of emancipation movements on a worldwide scale, have been compromised by their implication in colonization, slavery, slave trading and the emergence and intensification of Western racism. Since the Middle Passage, various forms of Black knowledge have provided vantage points for reading transatlantic histories and cultures in an alternative light: to look at the modern world through lessons from Haiti, the Black Seminoles, or the quilombo of Palmares, instead of primarily through the ideas of Voltaire or Hegel opens up different ways of conceptualizing knowledge, humanism, freedom and civil rights.

The Eighth Biennial Conference of the Collegium of African American Research (CAAR) in Bremen, Germany, March 25 – 29, 2009 explores the global epistemological, political, literary, and cultural impact of the many forms of African American diasporic knowledges and struggles and their enduring transnational manifestations. Underscoring the ubiquity of the crossfertilization of Black knowledge and Black struggles in a larger global arena, the conference will consider the various connections forged through production of knowledge, like the long lasting effects of African American movements for Civil Rights on Black cultural production, and on transatlantic social movements, literatures and cultures in general. It will illuminate this nexus in all its incarnations—abolition, feminisms/womanism, working-class struggles, anti-colonial movements and the peace movements, among others—and conduits, like the African American agents, historical and literary texts, visual culture and diverse institutions that have forged and articulated these connections.

Recognizing that African American diasporic interactions historically have expanded to include the Indian subcontinent, and, more recently, to reach other Asian countries like Japan and China, mainly through the spread of Black popular culture, the conference will extend its focus beyond a rigidly defined Atlantic milieu. As a forum for much needed dialogues/interactions between various disciplines and national and continental affiliations, this CAAR conference encourages contributions that would stimulate collaboration and exchanges between Black European Studies and African American Studies, and between African American Studies and a range of other disciplines on an international scale.

Viewing African American Studies as a global discipline, we invite proposals for panels, workshops and papers that address the diverse kinds of mutual recognition, negotiation and coalition-building of global African American agency, as well as antagonistic encounters borne by racism, class structures and misogyny. In order to counter both the backlash against multiculturalism and civil rights in the US and the recent reconfiguration of Europe as a fortress of the West against so called invasion from the South and East, many telling cases in point might be addressed. The symptomatic discourses around Katrina and Jena, or the debates around the current tragedy of illegal, and lethal mass African migration to Europe's South figure here in only exemplary fashion.

The deadline for paper proposals is 1 September 2008. Please send them to the President of CAAR, Prof. Sabine Broeck, Sabine Broeck [broeck@uni-bremen.de]