Friday, November 2, 2007
James Room, Barnard Hall
Columbia University
The symposium celebrates the 20th anniversary of Hazel Carby’s groundbreaking text, Reconstructing Womanhood, which traces the emergence of the novel as a forum for political and cultural reconstruction and examines the ways in which dominant racial and sexual ideologies influenced the literary conventions of women's fiction. The work of reconstruction announced by the title is three-fold: it describes the efforts of nineteenth-century writers and activists to redefine the meaning of womanhood and to challenge the color-line that placed blacks outside the boundaries of the human; it entails political efforts to transform and refashion the state; and it encompasses the critical labor of imagining a future beyond Man. Honoring the interdisciplinary significance of Carby's scholarship in Literary and Cultural Studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and post-colonial criticism, this one-day symposium revisits the import of this work in relation to an extended set of issues that include re-writing the human, the production of disposable life, refashioning masculinities and queer sexualities, and creating a world beyond empire.
List of Speakers
Hazel Carby, Yale University
Lisa Lowe, University of California, San Diego
Anne McClintock, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Robert Reid-Pharr, CUNY Graduate Center
Rinaldo Walcott, University of Toronto
Conference Schedule
9:30am
Welcome and Opening Remarks: Saidiya Hartman, Columbia University, and Robert Stepto, Yale University **Coffee available to participants
10:00am-11:00am “Paranoid Empire and Imperial Déjà Vu: Specters from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib” Anne McClintock, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Moderator: Janet Jackobsen, Barnard College
11:00am
Coffee Break
11:10am-12:15am “The Stranger’s Work: Desire, Intimacy, Violence, and (Black) Cultural Restoration” Robert Reid-Pharr, CUNY- Graduate Center
Moderator: Philip Brian Harper, NYU
12:30-1:50pm
Lunch Break
2:00pm-3:00pm "Reading and Reckoning Histories of Loss" Lisa Lowe, UC-San Diego/Yale University (in-residence)
Moderator: Neferti Tadiar, Barnard College
3:15pm-4:15pm "Reconstructing Manhood; or the Drag of Black Masculinity" Rinaldo Walcott, University of Toronto
Moderator: Tina Campt, Duke University
4:15pm ** Coffee available to participants
4:25-4:40pm
Introduction of Keynote Speaker: Farah Griffin, Columbia University
4:45pm-6:00pm Keynote Address: "Lost (and Found?) in Translation" Hazel V. Carby, Yale University
6:00pm-7:00pm
Reception – Sulzberger Parlor
The symposium has been made possible by the generous funding of the following institutional partners: Office of the Provost,Yale University; Barnard Center for Research on Women; Institute for Research on Women and Gender,Columbia University; Africana Studies, Barnard College; Institute for Research on African American Studies, Columbia University; Women's Studies Program, Duke University; Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program, Yale University; and Columbia University Libraries.
