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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 --- 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