The Routes of Black Studies

The American Cultures Workshop and the Stanford Humanities Center are pleased to announce the one-day symposium, "The Routes of Black Studies" to be held on May 13th in Levinthal Hall of the Humanities Center, 424 Santa Teresa Street.

Birthed in the crucible of social unrest, offering to some promises of cultural vindication, and attacked from all sides in the culture wars, Black Studies has always been a barometer of institutional responses to political pressure and intellectual change. Recycling narratives of birth, struggle, growth, decline, and rebirth have defined the evolution of Black Studies. Furthermore, these narratives have attained mythic force and thus foreshorten honest debate about the formation and deployment of Black Studies as a scholarly discipline and "blackness" as a way of being.

This conference begins with the simultaneous backward and forward looking implied in roots and routes as concepts. Movement through the symposium schedule will take us from the many places and intellectual spaces Black Studies has called home--its roots--and through some of the intellectual locations its desire has mapped before it--its routes. Beginning with and departing from a social and intellectual history and cultural studies based appraisal of the historical legacies that run through Black Studies, the latter portions of the symposium will move towards the post-civil rights age trajectories that literary theory, trauma studies and LGBT studies have in mind for the ongoing formation of the field.

"The Routes of Black Studies" is free and open to the public