SEPTEMBER 28-29, 2007

“Blackness Unbound: Constructions and Deconstructions of Transnational Blackness”,

Under the theme, “Blackness Unbound: Constructions and Deconstructions of Transnational Blackness”, the Small Axe Collective will host a two day symposium (September 28 th and 29 th 2007) at the University at Albany , SUNY. The symposium will examine the concepts of nation and diaspora in terms of the internationalization of blackness. This two-day symposium will provide, in some sense, a continuation of the theme of transnational blackness that was considered at the Small Axe/Brown University symposium of April 7 th and 8 th 2005.

On that occasion, examining the intersections of African-Caribbean and African-American discourses of blackness, personhood, and nation through the work of Africana and Caribbean Studies in the academy, the scholarship and activism of the Institute of the Black World, and the imaginative vision of Anglophone Caribbean literature, we pursued a very valuable, though primarily Anglophone, examination of blackness and diaspora. In furthering intellectual rumination on this topic, the S/X-UAlbany symposium will continue the analysis of the topic in terms of the English-speaking experience, but will also engage aspects of the Lusophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone transnational engagement with diasporic blackness. As such, this symposium will engender discussions with colleagues working in African-American Studies, Africana Studies, Latin American and U.S. Latino Studies, and Caribbean Studies.

Borrowing from Nadi Edward’s Small Axe essay (9.1 2005) entitled “Diaspora, Difference, and Black Internationalisms”, the symposium will consider, as has Brent Hayes Edwards in his work The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalisms, questions such as, How do we begin to understand differences within and among black communities nationally and internationally? How is blackness constructed and deconstructed nationally and internationally?

How does race, the signifier that Stuart Hall calls a ‘floating signifier’, signify differently in Haiti, Jamaica, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, or Brazil, compared with the structures of racialization and configurations of blackness when members of these Caribbean and Latin American territories relocate to the United States, or Canada, or Britain for example, and move back and forth between and among these territories? In light of such concerns, we have confirmed the following list of invited panelists for the two-day symposium at the University at Albany , State University of New York.

Caribbean Postcard

ART EXHIBIT

Rex Dixon

 

 

 

 

Exhibit location: University at Albany, Campus Center Lounge

The show at Albany will be a selection of works on paper and canvas completed in 2006 to 2007 in my studio in Maracas Valley, Trinidad. They mostly contain expressionistic mark making with figurative elements and text, representing an attempt, by a layering process with the materials, to illustrate the various layers of occupations of the Caribbean islands. As an UK born and educated painter living and working in the Caribbean for twenty two years, the paintings reflect the dichotomy of an insider/outsider, a situation in which I find myself.