Panel on Migration, Belonging, and Afro-Europeanness, at NeMLA 2022, Baltimore
This panel aims to explore how writers and filmmakers have articulated questions of Blackness and Europeanness, migration and cultural belonging, colonial histories and decolonial futures.
In recent decades, artists, scholars, and activists from all over Europe have interrogated and problematized wishful narratives about Europe as a democratic stronghold and a multicultural, borderless space. Working in different media, forms, and genres, these works address urgent questions, such as the racialization of migration, the persistent social and economic inequalities of urban spaces, and the legacies of repressed colonial histories.
This panel seeks contributions that engage this diverse production in relation to different national or transnational configurations, recent or less recent waves of migration, and future perspectives. How is Afro-Europeanness articulated in different regions of Europe? What antiracist or decolonial artistic practices have been emerging from the peripheral South and from the economically hegemonic North? How do these practices participate in, contest, or reframe dynamics of formation of the nation-state, specifically in light of current racialized constructions of national belonging? How do other scales, such as the Black Mediterranean or the African global diaspora, interact with national and continental formations?
Please submit your abstract at this link before September 30, 2021: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/19166
The conference will take place in Baltimore from March 10 to March 13, 2022.
Gabriele Lazzari