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Oct
14
2017

Black Arts International: Temporalities and Territories

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When: Saturday, October 14, 2017
9:30 AM - 8:00 PM CT

Cost: All events are free; however, reservations for some events are required.

Contact: Black Arts Initiative  

Group: Black Arts Consortium

Co-Sponsor: Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities

Category: Lectures & Meetings

Description:

Black Arts International: Temporalities and Territories is the third of the initial three conferences proposed by the Black Arts Initiative—the first focused on Chicago, and the second focused on the United States.  This conference will focus on art and scholarship of the black diaspora around the world.  The key themes of the conference engage notions of time, space and place and the ways in which black art plays a pivotal role in and has been influenced by historical epochs such as colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade, modernity and post-modernity, industrialization and globalization; and, geopolitical contexts where art has reflected the conditions of a specific place. Some of the questions the conference will engage include: How has history shaped black artistic production outside the US? How do non-western forms of black art disrupt concepts of time and space?  How might we conceive of black diasporic artistic forms outside the context of U.S.? How does the valuation of black art change within a global context?

The conference will challenge traditional conference formats by centering art as research as opposed to an object of research. Rather than a series of panels of “talking heads,” for example, each event will focus on a particular artistic event—e.g., film, musical performance, theatrical production, art exhibit, dance piece, etc.—that will be the genesis of critical engagement of the questions that frame the conference. We have invited artists and critics from South Africa, Germany, England, the Caribbean as well as the United States to engage the themes of the conference through their art and criticism. In addition, the conference will engage our students at Northwestern—both graduate and undergraduate—who have a vested interest in black artistic practice in a global context, through both their participation on panels and through their own art making. Like the first conference on black arts in Chicago, we will host parts of the conference in locations in the city to engage community stakeholders, such as Links Hall Performance Space, Evanston Space music venue, and the University of Chicago’s Logan Center. The conference will extend over the course of a week of performance events and panels and culminate in a collaboration with the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Performing Arts on a Pan African Congress on the Arts called Returns.

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