Black 1968 Presents: Virtual Brainstorming Workshop & Call for Papers

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of our founding, the faculty of the Department of African and African American Studies at Washington University will hold a conference on “Black 1968” in the spring of 2021. We therefore invite scholars from across the disciplines to submit essays interpreting the turbulent events of the late 1968s from the perspective of their particular fields and areas of expertise. We are interested to know more about how global forces like capitalism, imperialism, informal and institutionalized racism, migration, youth and labor activism, and cold war politics shaped local black experiences.

Topics like the civil rights movement, African liberation, the black power movement, freedom and Black liberation schools, and student activism will most likely appear in our collection, but the editors of Black 1968 also strongly welcome papers that explore the role of peoples of African descent in the larger events of the era like the student strikes, cold war controversies, liberation movements, and other key events of the period. We also encourage submissions that use innovative and unconventional methodologies to better understand these complex global and local interactions. What can the study of food, music, literature, film, gender, material culture, medicine, and incarceration tell us about Black 1968 that archives and other more conventional sources cannot?

To respond to this call for papers, please send a one page paper proposal and CV to the address below by 15 January 2021. The conference(s) to discuss these papers and select chapters for the book will most likely be held on Zoom in the late spring and/or early fall of 2021.

RSVP