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From: Sundiata Cha-Jua [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
RUPTURE, REPRESION AND UPRISING: RACED AND GENDERED VIOLENCE ALONG THE COLOR
LINE
April 3-5, 2008
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
By marking the anniversaries of the 1908 Springfield, Illinois riot, and the
cataclysmic events of 1968, this conference (re) investigates their legacies
for a dawning new century. This commemoration also provides a powerful point of
entry into larger scholarly conversations about the history of riots, other
organized violence against racialized bodies (including sexual and state
violence), rebellions and resistance, and their reverberations across time and
space.
Indeed, the violence in Springfield was but an episode in a broader pattern of
white mob actions that encompassed Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), Atlanta
(1905), East St. Louis, Illinois (1917), the "Red Summer" of 1919, and Tulsa,
Oklahoma (1921). These racial pogroms, often backed by white police and
governmental authority, were part of a long-term project of black subjugation.
This paralleled the emergence of the United States as a white supremacist
empire in the Western Hemisphere and Pacific through the Spanish-American War
(1898), as well as the continuing brutality of European colonialism in Asia and
Africa.
Sixty years after the events of Springfield, the National Advisory Commission
on Civil Disorders, headed by Illinois governor Otto Kerner, issued an
influential report on a wave of urban conflagrations that peaked that year
following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Detailing a web of U.S.
racial stratification, the Kerner Commission report, and the urban revolts it
addressed, came in the midst of a domestic and international sea change -
radical U.S. popular struggles and reactionary counter-movements; anti-colonial
and anti-imperialist struggles in southern Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin
America; the Tet Offensive in Southeast Asia; and the short-lived takeover of
the streets by Parisian students and workers.
"Rupture, Repression, and Uprising" seeks domestic, comparative, and
international/transnational explorations of varied forms of violence that
cross-disciplinary lines. We welcome papers and organized panels on topics
including, but not limited to, the following:
Racialized communities, structured, and state sponsored violence
1968, urban revolts, and Black Power
Interpreting the recent rebellions in the suburbs of Paris, France, and Sydney,
Australia, and their parallels
(Re) assessing the Moynihan Report, Kerner Commission, and constructions of the
"underclass"
Teaching courses in racialized violence
Race riots in the U.S. and abroad
Prison revolt, the prison-industrial complex, and questions of state violence
Sexualized racial violence and feminisms
Violence and intersections of race, gender, and sexualities
Environmental racism as violence
Violence within urban racialized communities
Truth and reconciliation: social movement or state enterprise
Rebellion, "law and order," and the new revanchism
Red Scare and Red Summer
Deadline for panel and paper abstracts is November 1, 2007. Submissions should
be mailed electronically, to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For general questions or
information, please contact Jennifer Hammer or Lou Turner at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
or 217.333.7781. You may also visit the website: www.aasrp.uiuc.edu.
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