Dear colleagues,
please find below once again a call for papers on the Haitian
Revolution. The deadline for submissions has been extended to 31st
December 2010.
Best wishes,
Jeanette Ehrmann
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Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Contestations:
DECOLONIZING THE SOCIAL SCIENCES AND THE HUMANITIES
International Graduate Conference
Frankfurt Research Center for Postcolonial Studies
16th - 18th June 2011, Goethe-University Frankfurt
Panel 13: Revolution Reconsidered ?
Enlightenment, Slavery and the Haitian Revolution
Panel Convenor: Jeanette Ehrmann
The emergence of the Western concept of modernity and its accompanying
normative ideals of liberty, equality and human rights, which are at
the heart of modern liberal democracy, are inextricably linked to the
Age of Revolution. According to Hannah Arendt, they are outcomes of
?the two great revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century? ?
thereby referring to the American and the French Revolution. The
Haitian Revolution, by contrast, is marked by oblivion. The slave
insurrections on the sugar plantations of Saint-Domingue, however,
which broke out in 1791 and aimed at a radical overthrow of a deeply
racialized society, led to the proclamation of the first independent
Black republic under the name of Haiti. The silencing of this
monumental history in the canonical writings of political theory and
the history of ideas not only masks that slavery in the Caribbean was
a constitutive element of a genuinely modern capitalist world system
and hence of modernity itself. It also complicates the accounts of an
Enlightenment discourse that is relayed as a distinctly Western
success story in terms of the moral progress of a united humanity,
whereby the ideological foundations of racial slavery provided by
Enlightenment thinkers are wiped away. Based on these silences, the
idea of the panel is not only the inclusion of the Haitian Revolution
in the canon of political theory but rather ? inspired by Sibylle
Fischer?s approach in ?Modernity Disavowed? ? a revision of the very
concepts of revolution and Enlightenment. As the challenging of the
emancipation of the white, male bourgeois of the metropolis as well as
the discourse on the abolition of slavery were a focal point for
different emancipatory projects ? for the European and North American
women?s movements as well as for the struggle for racial equality ? a
heuristic stance that takes the intersections of struggles for race
and gender equality into account seems both necessary and promising in
producing new insights into the normative ideals they pursue.
? Haiti and the utopia of a raceless society
? Plantocracy as a complex web of gendered and racialized power and domination
? Vodou as a means of resistance and empowerment
? Gendered forms of resistance
? Slavery, capitalism and Enlightenment
? Transatlantic exchange processes of normative ideals and discourses
? Interactions between different emancipatory movements (gender equality
vs. race
equality) in the metropolis and in the colonies
? Gendered race and racialized gender relations in pre- and
postrevolutionary Haiti
Abstracts (deadline 30th November 2010) and queries should be submitted to:
[log in to unmask]
For further information on the conference please consult:
http://www.frcps.uni-frankfurt.de/?page_id=729
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