A Virtual Conference Hosted by Mount Holyoke College
Hortense Spillers suggests that a new “grammar” for thinking and instigating Black liberation from white history is necessary. With this conference we offer a platform, one virtual but intimate, for people interested in seeking what new grammars we in the eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and present centuries need to learn from Black Studies in our period-bound disciplines. Our hope for the conference is that it will address the white power structures that support anti-blackness in the larger world and in the field of Romanticism very broadly understood. Romanticism entails a history of promised but failed revolutions, a history that terrorizes as much as it transforms. While the field has long been shaped by histories and discourses of whiteness and patriarchy, this conference avows and solicits new and ongoing scholarship on race, anti-slavery, abolition, and indigeneity.
Sponsored by the English Department, the Critical Social Thought Program, a Racial Equity Research and Action (RERA) Grant, and a Davis Educational Foundation Grant.