Symposium "African American Worldmaking in the Long Nineteenth Century"
University of Potsdam // Campus Neues Palais // October 11-12, 2019
Outline
Our symposium sets out to trace the many ways in which African Americans in the long nineteenth century conceptualized the world in imaginative and material modes, in theory and in practice. We understand worldmaking in various senses of constructing a world and one’s place in it. In the words of Nelson Goodman, “worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is the remaking.” Scholars in postcolonial studies have differentiated between worlding as an act of colonization (the colonial mapping of the globe as a possessive and interpretive act) on the one hand, and conceptions of planetarity (an awareness of our planet as unknowable and vulnerable, as well as a sense of human connectedness) on the other (Said, Spivak, Gilroy). In world literature debates, there is an attempt to differentiate capitalist and neocolonial modes of controlling the globe from worldmaking as the literary conception of multiple alternative worlds in the process of becoming (Cheah).
Our symposium is interested in how worlds were made and remade in the historical contexts of diaspora, enslavement, and segregation in North America. How did people of African ancestry map their world in the long nineteenth century? Which networks and connections did they envision and create? Which genres and modes did they employ to conceive of their place in the cosmos? What kind of worldviews did they create, discuss, or dismiss? How did they relate to debates on cosmopolitanism? We invite papers from various perspectives (history and public history, literary and cultural studies, and other fields) that address some of these questions. We encourage papers that theorize possible approaches to African American worldmaking: Which factors (such as identity, character, race, cultural belonging, gender, religion, enslavement, economics, mobility, territory, community, nation, diaspora, pan-Africanism, cosmopolitanism, etc.) are useful for this analysis? Which new approaches and paradigms may we need to develop? The symposium seeks to bring together an international group of established and early career scholars from various institutions and disciplines in the hope of generating intense discussion and exchange.
The symposium will take place at the University of Potsdam on October 11 and 12, 2019. It comprises two formats: regular papers and work in progress. Regular papers are 40 minutes long (followed by 20 minutes of discussion). Presentations of work in progress are 20 minutes long (followed by 40 minutes of discussion).
Please register until October 1st!
Speakers
Niya Bates (International Center for Jefferson Studies)
The Art of Interpretation
In the context of the Hemingses at Monticello, worldmaking was different than the worldmaking of many enslaved people who knew little beyond their local plantations. An entire generation of Hemings siblings traveled the east coast from Charlottesville to Philadelphia and abroad to Paris, providing them the opportunity to make worlds for themselves within and outside the confines of slavery. Through exhibits and interpretation at Monticello and in a poetry collection entitled Mistress, Bates and Sebree will explore what it means to make and interpret worlds for contemporary audiences out of the world nineteenth century African Americans made for themselves.
Biographical note
Niya Bates is Director of African American History and Getting Word Oral History Project in the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. She has been with Monticello since 2016. Started in 1993, Getting Word is a growing archive of over 200 oral histories of people descended from slaves at Monticello. Niya works to engage local and national audiences in dialogue about Monticello, slavery and its enduring legacies, and race. She earned a B.A. in African and African American Studies and an M.A. in Architectural History and Historic Preservation – both from the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on enslaved families at Monticello, African American life in the Reconstruction Era in Virginia, and rural cultural preservation. She has published articles in Arris: Journal of the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.
Michael Drexler (Bucknell University)
Looking Forward/Looking Backward: African-American Futures at an Historically Black College in West Virginia
Storer College, one of the first Historically Black Colleges (HBCU), was founded in 1865 and incorporated as a public college of West Virginia in 1867 at Harpers Ferry in the hills overlooking the US arms depot that John Brown and his raiders attacked in 1859, initiating the Civil War. In 1955, Storer closed following the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which had given West Virginia legislators the excuse to cut funding for separate, but equal schools. During its remarkable history, Storer staged several important moments in the history of the Civil Rights Movement, including notable speeches by prominent African Americans. Among these were College Trustee Frederick Douglass, the Evangelical pan-Africanist Alexander Crummell, and W.E.B. DuBois, who led the Niagara Movement’s first public convention on US soil at the college in 1906. In 1909, the Niagara Movement reformed as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Taken together, these speeches trace the world-making creativity of African American leaders including some significant disagreement about how to position enslavement in visions of the future for the race. At times, these discussions were both vigorous and hotly contested. Frederick Douglass reportedly interrupted Crummell’s commencement speech in 1885, when the latter argued that looking backward at slavery ran counter to realizing black liberation moving forward. In this paper, I will review the history of historically black colleges with particular attention to Storer College and then will discuss speeches by Douglass, Crummell and DuBois, paying particular attention to two elements: 1) mentions of John Brown and the setting of the college in Harpers Ferry, and 2) claims about the importance of the past to the future of African American life in the US or beyond. The role of John Brown’s activism in these speeches is noteworthy beyond Brown’s connection to the college’s setting. Indeed, attitudes about slavery, reparations, and the future come into particular relief in the light of Brown’s raid, his inter-racial coalition, and his spectacular violent deeds and martyrdom. This historical and cultural context is especially valuable today when, in response to Ta-Nehisi Coates call, several Democratic candidates for the US Presidency have come out in support of federal reparations for slavery and the US Congress hosted its first hearing on the matter in June 2019.
Biographical note
Michael Drexler is professor of English at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA. His book (with Ed White) The Traumatic Colonel: The Founding Fathers, Slavery, and the Phantasmatic Aaron Burr was published by NYU in 2014. He also co-editedboth The Haitain Revolution and the Early United States (UPenn 2016) and Beyond Douglass: New Approaches to African-American Literature (Bucknell 2008). His work also appears in Early American Literature, American Literary History, Atlantic Studies and several edited collections, most recently in The Oxford Companion to Charles Brockden Brown (2019).
Helen A. Gibson (Freie Universität Berlin)
Joy, Terror, and Humiliation in Cars: Emotional Black Worldmaking at the Twilight of the Long Nineteenth Century
The automotive experiences of early Black motorists, earthshattering in their kinetic potential, were haunted by the terror of the threat of lynching and the everyday humiliation of racialization in the conflation of ‘blackness’ with speed. Speeding (or, simply, driving) in automobiles in the first several decades of the twentieth century remained largely the prerogative of white drivers, as Black motorists were discursively associated with risk. Yet despite persistent experiences of violence while driving in the United States, the car beckoned to Black motorists from its advent as a semi-private space through which to escape racial trauma and surveillance. Black chauffeurs’ clubs, which operated nationally as ubiquitous mini-unions, and reports of Black ‘joyriding’ in the presses, offer a glimpse of a world defined against, but not limited to, the realities of racial terror and humiliation on public transportation so endemic to our understanding of contemporaneous Black worldmaking. A focus on joy holds the potential to temporarily subvert ‘pornotroping’ (Spillers), bringing to the fore the affective self-fashioning of historical actors who understood themselves to be individual members of Black communities. This paper explores ways in which Black Americans pursued joy in cars between the years of 1895 and 1914, unearthing a cosmopolitan mode of worldmaking since lost between accounts of chattel slavery and segregated train travel. The poles of (desired, lived) joy and accusations of ‘excess’ joy are helpful points for mapping the emotional afterlives of slavery for Black Americans in the material space of the car.
Biographical note
Helen Gibson is a doctoral candidate in the history department of the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, where her research is funded via the Graduate School of North American Studies by a grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG). Helen is currently completing her dissertation, entitled “Joyriding across the Color Line: Automotivity and Citizenship in the United States, 1895-1939.” A graduate of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (M.A.) and the University of Virginia (B.A.), Helen has taught and published on the experience of ‘free’ Black populations as uniquely targeted in the antebellum criminal justice system of the United States. Her first article, “Felons and the Right to Vote in Virginia: a Historical Overview” in The Virginia News Letter 91, no. 1 (Jan. 2015): 1-9, was cited in 2016 in an amicus curiae brief by the Virginia State Conference of the N.A.A.C.P.
Johanna Heide (Universität Potsdam)
Re-claiming Her Story: Female Fugitives from Slavery and the Printed Wor(l)d
My work-in-progress presentation focuses on the archive of slave narratives and on how its constituents – ranging from runaway notices to interviews and book-length narratives – document instances of African American worldmaking. Narratives of self-emancipated Black women are underrepresented within this archive. However, their stories are especially relevant in the context of worldmaking since they document transgressions of both 19th century race and gender boundaries. In order to successfully "steal themselves," female fugitives had to replace the cultural logic of slavery and the narrow definition of "true womanhood" with an alternative set of narratives. The story of George Washington's fugitive Ona Judge is one example of a successfully altered narrative of self and the world around. Through close-readings of the runaway advertisement for Ona posted by the Washingtons in 1796 and two interviews she gave to the abolitionist press in the 1840s, I explore her story as it was reported by the media. Keeping the mediated nature of slave narratives in general and hers in particular in mind, I screen the historical documents for forms of agency and strategies of resistance enacted by the formerly enslaved. The strategies I explore – most notably the attempt to pass as free – are intricately linked to physical and social mobility. This link prompted the historian David Waldstreicher to characterize the fugitive as "cosmopolitan" already in 1999. Drawing on Waldstreicher and Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo's more recent work Black Cosmopolitanism, I will explore how the strategies Ona and other female fugitives enacted relate to conceptualizations of cosmopolitanism.
Biographical note
Johanna Heide is a first-year PhD student at the University of Potsdam and a fellow with the DFG-funded Research Training Group "Minor Cosmopolitanisms." Her dissertation project with the working title "Re-reading the American 'Archive of Slavery' Through a Gendered Lens" explores the histories of self-emancipated and free Black women in the antebellum North based on textual and visual archives. The PhD project is a continuation of her longstanding interest in questions of the archive. She studied American Studies and Cultural Studies at the University of Potsdam, Duke University and at the English Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad. Besides her PhD she works as a non-fiction and news editor.
Judith Madera (Wake Forest University)
Black Utopias: Modal Worlds and Movements
My talk cues a radical Black geographical record that emerged across the Caribbean and the US during the long epoch of abolition. I draw attention to individuals whose stories have too often been buried in the archive, but who literally traversed worlds as a way to counter nineteenth-century slavery’s known coordinates. These include activist-emigrationists like Mary Ann Shadd and Henry Bibb, as well as Pan-Africanists like Edward Wilmot Blyden, whose Ethiopianism influenced W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, among others. My discussion of worldmaking will mostly center on nineteenth-century Black futurism projects and the ways they took shape in material spaces, spaces that often defied the closure of representation. To this end, I describe histories formed in the relay of geographic venture and print circulation. I claim that the purchase of utopic possibility can alight even in destructive, body-consuming spaces. Utopias need not be unreal sites, or expression framed by the negative aesthetics of dislocation. They can be sensory-driven environs that defy dominant benchmarks of jurisdiction, like those described by Mary Prince from the Eastern fringes of the Caribbean to Susanna Strickland, or the archipelagoes projected by Nancy Gardner Prince of Boston and Afro-Trinidadian Michel Philip as a poetics of resistance. Radical geography does not merely challenge the official alignment system. Instead, it invents connectivity in sites that look like closures. It insists on forms that give presence to Black embodiment.
Biographical note
Judith Madera is associate professor of English at Wake Forest University, where she teaches courses in African American and Caribbean literature. She is affiliated faculty in Environmental Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.Her book Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature was published by Duke U.P. in 2015. Recent work has also appeared in WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly; the Journal of American History; ELN; The Radical History Review; Discourse; and Nineteenth-Century Prose.
Ifeoma Nwankwo (Vanderbilt University)
Reconstructing Hope: African Americans and Latin America in the Long Nineteenth Century
In the wake of the Haitian Revolution, the War Between the States, and the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, U.S. African Americans had reason to be hopeful about their future. They were being elected to public office in numbers never before seen, or allowed. This future was not to be, however. The backlash against Reconstruction ultimately brought about its death in the 1870s. At the same time that Reconstruction was moving from hope to reality to shattered dream, the United States was expanding its political, military, economic, and social footprint in its Latin American “backyard.” The United States’ involvement in the region through the construction of the Panama Railroad (1850-1855) and Panama Canal (1904-1914) are key examples of this intensified interventionism.
This essay reveals the ways in which U.S. exploits in Panama figured into African Americans’ sense of the avenues to the American Dream available to them after Reconstruction’s failure. In particular, it analyzes a collection of federal records on African American involvement in the U.S.’ Panama Canal endeavor housed at the National Archives. This multi-genre collection reveals the negotiations undertaken by African American federal employees battling to find a place and a voice in a moment characterized by increased anti-black violence not only in the United States, but also in Latin America. (One illustrative instance is the 1912 massacre of the members of the Independent Party of People of Color in Cuba.)
Readings focus on two specific areas. The first is African Americans’ stance toward the U.S. imperial mission in Panama. Did they envision themselves as part of or as apart from this undertaking? What terms do they use to describe their engagement? Are those terms different in government reports and personal correspondence? The second key focus area is their attitude toward non-U.S. Blacks they encounter while on the Isthmus. Do they understand themselves as distinct from British West Indians because of the latter’s affiliation with the British Empire? Is there a discernable language of racial solidarity? How do they articulate the divergences and convergences between U.S. and British imperial actions? Discussion of this second area is supplemented by close readings of select documents from three private collections. Through these readings, we gain a novel perspective on not only U.S. Empire in Latin America but also its impact on the meanings, mechanics, and manifestations of U.S. African Americans’ worldviews.
Biographical note
Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo, Ph.D.,is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Vanderbilt University. Her work centers on intercultural and intergenerational relations, particularly as they surface in the literary texts, oral narratives, and popular music of Afro-descendants in the U.S., Caribbean, and Latin America. Her publications include Black Cosmopolitanism; “Bilingualism, Blackness, and Belonging,”; “Race and Representation in the Digital Humanities;” African Routes, Caribbean Roots, Latino Lives; Rhythms of the Afro-Atlantic World (co-edited with Mamadou Diouf); “Living the West Indian Dream”(forthcoming) and “Globally Engaged” Pedagogy, Research, and Creative Practice (co-edited with Jeff Hou and Jan Cohen-Cruz). She is founding director of the Voices from Our America and Wisdom of the Elders public scholarship projects.
Anthony James Obst (Freie Universität Berlin)
The Long Nineteenth Century and Long Emancipation: Black Radical Tragic Worldmaking in the Wake of the Haitian Revolution
If the year 1914 marks the end of the “Age of Empire” and thus of the long nineteenth century according to Eric Hobsbawm’s canonical definition, what do we as Americanists make of the U.S. military invasion of Haiti in 1915, constituting an expansion of U.S. imperialism and initiating 19 years of occupation? How useful is such a periodization if Haiti, this critical locus of the “Age of Revolution”, is once again under foreign control, a (long) century after radically challenging colonialism, enslavement and white supremacy? What insights can we gain by investigating this period not as one bookended by discrete historical markers but as one located within the extended timeframe that Rinaldo Walcott refers to as “long emancipation” instead?In the context of African American worldmaking, a wealth of artists, intellectuals, writers and activists responded to the U.S. military occupation of Haiti by drawing lines from its revolutionary past to its contemporary moment of curtailed freedom. This paper examines two literary responses in particular that celebrate Haiti’s Black radical history, while ultimately positing long emancipation as an unfinished project at the time of their writing. Langston Hughes’s Emperor of Haiti and Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder (both 1936) mobilize tragic modes of worldmaking to grapple with this ambiguity, taking as their subject one of the most incisive events in the Atlantic world during the historical period that lends form to this symposium. My analysis investigates how the worldmaking strategy that Jeremy Matthew Glick has characterized as the “Black Radical Tragic” highlights the unfinished nature of long emancipation beyond the conventional markers of the long nineteenth century.
Biographical note
Anthony James Obst is a first-year PhD student at the Freie Universität Berlin’s Graduate School of North American Studies. In between acquiring his Bachelor’s degree in American Studies and German Literature at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and completing his Master’s degree in North American Studies at Freie Universität, he worked as a music journalist and editor for seven years. In 2014 he won the Rocco Clein Preis for young journalists. At the John F. Kennedy Institute’s 2017 symposium, “Configurations of the Black Atlantic”, he presented a paper on the cultural politics of the experimental musician Dean Blunt and his paper “Ceremony Found: Sylvia Wynter’s Hybrid Human and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony” was published in the 2019 issue of aspeers.
Erik Redling (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg)
Dialect Writing as Worldmaking: Zora Neale Hurston, Translation, and Dynamic Identity Constructions
Ever since Nelson Goodman introduced the concept of “worldmaking” in his seminal study Ways of Worldmaking (1978), critics have examined a wide array of ways of constructing different worlds ranging from colonial and neocolonial worldings to literary conceptions of alternative worlds. Dialect writing, however, has to my knowledge remained a neglected subject in this particular field of inquiry. In my paper, I argue that dialect writing inspired Zora Neale Hurston to develop a new way of perceiving her identity and place as an African American in early twentieth-century America. While many of her contemporary African American Harlemites (e.g., Alain Locke and Richard Wright) emphasized the need to give a voice to a specifically African American identity and culture, Zora Neale Hurston studied the process of translation as a model (or mode) for viewing the world and her identity. Drawing on her experience of translating immaterial ‘thoughts’ into multiple languages such as literary renderings of black vernacular speech and written Standard English, she created the notion of an immaterial self – a ‘raceless’ self (“At certain times I have no race, I am me,” qtd. in “How it Feels to Be Colored Me”) – that, depending on specific physical-situational contexts (e.g., is she sitting right next to a white man or is she listening to jazz music), turns her ‘raceless’ identity into a “colored” one. Rather than perceiving her identity solely in bodily terms or as a “performative accomplishment” (Judith Butler), Zora Neale Hurston discovered and explored through dialect writing and translation a shifting process of psychological-affective identity making which freed her from static dichotomous identity constructions (black vs. white) and enabled her to generate a world and literature of her own.
Biographical Note
Erik Redling is Professor of American Literature at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (since 2013) and Managing Director of the Muhlenberg Center for American Studies (https://muhlenbergcenter.uni-halle.de), which he founded in 2014. His main areas of interest include intermediality, jazz poetry, cognitive poetics, translation theories, film analysis, and dialect literature. He has published two monographs (Translating Jazz into Poetry: From Mimesis to Metaphor, De Gruyter, 2017, and "Speaking of Dialect": Translating Charles W. Chesnutt's Conjure Tales into Postmodern Systems of Signification, Königshausen & Neumann, 2006) and is (co-)editor of several anthologies, including Traveling Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Cultural Concepts and Transatlantic Intellectual Networks (De Gruyter 2016) and Protestantism on Screen: Religion, Politics, and Aesthetics in European and American Movies (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Currently he is working on a book about Zora Neale Hurston, dialect writing, and translation.
Nele Sawallisch (Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies)
Worldmaking, Disrupted. Black Community Building in the Early Nineteenth Century
Crossing the border into British North America would be, as Black refugees from slavery and oppression hoped, as though they would step into a different world: from enslaved to fugitive to freeman, they would be able to enjoy a life under the “Lion’s paw” and as the Queen’s loyal subjects. What we call Canada today was therefore a crucial destination for Black people’s imaginary and material worldmaking, both for its ideological leverage as the so-called Promised Land as well as for the concrete promises it seemed to hold for Black people, including equal protection before the law, the right to vote and hold property, and to become citizens. I have suggested elsewhere that we can understand such processes of worldmaking through the (life) writing of Black immigrants to Canada, and more particularly, through their reliance on different genealogies that anchor them in Black communities across borders and below the level of nation-states. This paper will be concerned with the ambiguous leader Josiah Henson, who once gained fame as the “real Uncle Tom” and was instrumental in the Dawn settlement/the British American Institute. His autobiographies and the documents on the Dawn controversy highlight both Canada’s fascinating role for Black refugees as well as the difficult processes of community building in the early nineteenth century.
Biographical note
Nele Sawallisch currently works as a post-doctoral lecturer at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, where she received her PhD in 2017. Her first monograph Fugitive Borders: Black Canadian Cross-Border Literature at Mid-Nineteenth Century (transcript, 2019) discusses community-building processes and genealogies in autobiographical writing by formerly enslaved men from the 1850s in the North American borderland between the United States and Canada. She is co-editor of a special forum on “Transnational Black Politics and Resistance, from Enslavement to Obama” with the Journal of Transnational American Studies (10.1, 2019) and currently preparing another co-edited special issue on “Black Editorship in the Early Atlantic World” (Atlantic Studies).
Chet'la Sebree (Bucknell University)
The Art of Interpretation
In the context of the Hemingses at Monticello, worldmaking was different than the worldmaking of many enslaved people who knew little beyond their local plantations. An entire generation of Hemings siblings traveled the east coast from Charlottesville to Philadelphia and abroad to Paris, providing them the opportunity to make worlds for themselves within and outside the confines of slavery. Through exhibits and interpretation at Monticello and in a poetry collection entitled Mistress, Bates and Sebree will explore what it means to make and interpret worlds for contemporary audiences out of the world nineteenth century African Americans made for themselves.
Biographical note
Chet’la Sebree is the Director of the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts and an Assistant Professor of English at Bucknell University. She is the author of Mistress, a poetry collection which explores black female experiences and representation through the lenses of a contemporary speaker and Sally Hemings. In support of this work, she has received fellowships from the Richard H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Delaware Division of the Arts. Her work has been included in journals and anthologies including Early American Literature, Modern Language Studies, and Monticello in Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Jefferson (University of Virginia Press, 2016), edited by Lisa Russ Spaar.
Winfried Siemerling (University of Waterloo)
Around 1852: Emigrationism, Canada, and Black Diasporic Worldmaking
This paper will focus on the year 1852 to examine what conclusions some of the key North American black thinkers had arrived at two years after the infamous 1850 United States fugitive slave law had created what for them was a different world. Instead of offering merely “tactical” resistance in the face of overwhelming oppression, black intellectuals including Mary Ann Shadd, Martin Delany, and Samuel Ringgold Ward responded with often large-scale strategic worldmaking of their own. Canada, while of crucial importance to these black leaders, played varying roles in their visions. This paper, then, will look at a variety of perspectives that sought to react in positive and often daring ways to a new situation, and will seek to place these undertakings in a historical moment that in retrospect still appears as a crucial cross-road of possibilities.
Biographical note
Winfried Siemerling is Professor of English at the University of Waterloo and an Associate of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. He won the Gabrielle Roy Prize for The Black Atlantic Reconsidered (2015). Earlier books include Canada and Its Americas (co-edited, 2010), The New North American Studies (2005, French translation 2010), and Discoveries of the Other (1994). He has contributed chapters to The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative (2014), The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature (2012), and African American Literature in Transition (Cambridge UP, forthcoming). He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2019.
Dirk Wiemann (Universität Potsdam)
On worlding and worldmaking
The two related but by no means synonymous terms of ‘worlding’ and ‘worldmaking’ have of late become prominent features in cultural and literary studies, most certainly due to the intensified awareness that under conditions of globalization we can no longer situate ourselves in any one particular place but instead have to ‘cognitively map’ our position within a global framework. People, as Arjun Appadurai asserts, do no longer adhere to circumscribed imagined communities alone but increasingly inhabit “imagined worlds”. ‘Worlding’ is often used with more or less elaborate references to Martin Heidegger’s notion of the world not as the totality of objects/matter assembled in space but as a set of relations that unfold in time so that ‘world’ becomes a verb rather than a noun, culminating in the notorious formula that die Welt weltet (literally, ‘the world worlds’). If ‘worlding’ in this understanding appeals especially to a phenomenological sensibility, ‘worldmaking’ has a clearly constructivist tradition (as in the works of Nelson Goodman or Nicolas Onuf), where it has mostly emphasised the active and constitutive roles that people play in the establishment, modification or even revolutionary overhaul of social realities – whether in the arena of politics or poetics. In my brief presentation I would like to discuss some of the more influential usages of ‘worlding’ and ‘worldmaking’ today and speculate a little bit about their political ‘backstories’ by trying to reconstruct them as rhetoric moves in response to the discursive environment from which they have emerged.
Biographical note
Dirk Wiemann is Professor of English Literature at the University of Potsdam. He is co-spokesperson of the DFG-funded RTG Minor Cosmopolitanisms at the University of Potsdam and director of a bilateral research and exchange programme with the University of Delhi on Genre Transactions in World-Literary Space, funded by DAAD and its Indian counterpart, the UGC. Previous positions include posts as Assistant Professor at the University of Tübingen and the University of Magdeburg. From 1998 to 2001, he acted as a senior lecturer at the University of Delhi and the University of Hyderabad and has not yet sorted out his love affair with India even after all these years. His most recent book publication, co-authored with three colleagues and friends from the University of Potsdam, is Postcolonial Literatures in English: An Introduction (2019). He is also the author of Genres of Modernity: Contemporary Indian Novels in English (2008), and the co-editor of European Contexts for English Republicanism (2013) and Perspectives on English Revolutionary Republicanism (2014), among others. His research interests include English Republicanism; Indian writing in English; cosmopolitanism; and genre transformations in contemporary world literature.
Heinrich Wilke (Universität Potsdam)
Refashioning the Plantation: Toussaint Louverture’s Labour Policies as Worldmaking
Although it began with the widespread killing of enslavers and the torching of estates, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) did not leave forced labour and plantation monoculture hopelessly imperilled. As black generals replaced “big whites” in the colonial hierarchy, a new line of conflict emerged: that between the black elite and black cultivators. Toussaint Louverture in particular, born into slavery but already free by the time the uprising began, was anxious to adapt the old plantation order to post-emancipation conditions. While securing many victories for the formerly enslaved as a general, Toussaint took care to maintain plantation production. Emerging victorious from the War of the South in 1800, he was free to implement forced-labour policies colony-wide. Though formally emancipated and working for wages, cultivators were bound to their respective plantation; runaways were seen, and shot, as deserters. By enforcing military discipline on the plantation, Toussaint implemented a labour regime reminiscent of pre-revolutionary arrangements.Toussaint’s advocacy of the plantation can be viewed as a particular kind of worldmaking. It took shape in explicit contradistinction to alternative visions of a post-emancipation society. In proclamations issued in 1800 and 1801, Toussaint defended his societal model against other possible ‘worlds’ that the Haitian Revolution had given rise to, especially young blacks’ understanding of freedom as located outside of plantation labour. In my contribution, I analyze the rhetorical strategies Toussaint employs in those proclamations, inquiring into how they delegitimize alternative ways of revolutionary worldmaking, and how they bolster his own.
Biographical note
Heinrich Wilke studied English and Philosophy at the University of Tübingen and the University of Connecticut, graduating with a Staatsexamen (i.e., teaching degree) and an M.A. in English Literatures and Cultures. Since 2016, he has been a doctoral fellow in the Research Training Group “Minor Cosmopolitanisms” at Potsdam University. Under the supervision of Lars Eckstein and Marcus Boon (York University, Toronto), he researches the plantation system of the colonial Caribbean from around 1650 to 1800. His project focuses on monoculture as a decidedly capitalist form of cultivation, inquiring into its economic and ecological presuppositions, such as enslaved labour and deforestation, as well as its sedimentation in (the form of) texts. To this end, he interprets anglophone writings of various genres, from plantation manuals and travel writing to letters and poetry, from an eco-Marxist perspective. In the final chapter, he extends his analysis to revolutionary Saint-Domingue.
Call for Papers
Four Presentation Slots for Early-Career Scholars: Work in Progress Presentations
Deadline: July 15, 2019
Program
Friday, October 11, Campus Neues Palais // Building 9 // Room 1.15
| Time | Event |
| 10:00–10:30 | Verena Adamik, Hannah Spahn, and Nicole Waller |
| Introduction | |
| 10:30–11:00 | Dirk Wiemann |
| On Worlding and Worldmaking | |
| 11:00–12:00 | Ifeoma Nwankwo |
| Reconstructing Hope: African Americans and Latin America in the Long Nineteenth Century | |
| 12:00–13:30 | Lunch (Mensa) |
| 13:30–14:30 | Judith Madera |
| Black Utopias: Modal Worlds and Movements | |
| 14:30–15:30 | Anthony James Obst |
| (Work in Progress Presentation): The Long Nineteenth Century and Long Emancipation: Black Radical Tragic Worldmaking in the Wake of the Haitian Revolution | |
| 15:30–16:00 | Coffee break |
| 16:00–17:00 | Heinrich Wilke |
| (Work in Progress Presentation): Refashioning the Plantation: Toussaint Louverture’s Labour Policies as Worldmaking | |
| 17:00–18:00 | Chet’la Sebree, Niya Bates |
| The Art of Interpretation | |
| 20:00 | Conference Dinner at Theaterklause |
Saturday, October 12, Campus Neues Palais // Building 9 // Room 1.15
| Time | Event |
| 10:00–11:00 | Winfried Siemerling |
| Around 1852: Emigrationism, Canada, and Black Diasporic Worldmaking | |
| 11:00–12:00 | Nele Sawallisch |
| Worldmaking, Disrupted: Black Community Building in the Early Nineteenth Century | |
| 12:00–13:30 | Lunch |
| 13:30–14:30 | Michael Drexler |
| Looking Forward/Looking Backward: African American Futures at a Historically Black College in West Virginia | |
| 14:30–15:30 | Johanna Heide |
| (Work in Progress Presentation): Re-claiming Her Story: Female Fugitives from Slavery and the Printed Wor(l)d | |
| 15:30–16:00 | Coffee break |
| 16:00–17:00 | Helen A. Gibson |
| (Work in Progress Presentation): Joy, Terror, and Humiliation in Cars: Emotional Black Worldmaking at the Twilight of the Long Nineteenth Century | |
| 17:00–18:00 | Erik Redling |
| Dialect Writing as Worldmaking: Zora Neale Hurston, Translation, and Dynamic Identity Constructions | |
| 18:15–18:45 | Wrap-Up Discussion |
| 19:00 | Casual get together |
Venue
The symposium will take place on October 11th and 12th 2019 at the University of Potsdam, Campus Neues Palais, Building 9, Room 1.15.
For more information, please check the campus map below.
Directions (general)
Campus Neues Palais is within walking distance of the train station "Potsdam Bahnhof Park Sanssouci" and the bus stop "Neues Palais".
Train connections from Berlin:
The train RE1 to >Brandenburg Bhf< passes through all major Berlin stations (Alexanderplatz, Friedrichstrasse, Hauptbahnhof, Zoologischer Garten, etc.) and stops directly at >Potsdam Bhf Park Sanssouci<.
Please note: The RE1 to >Magdeburg Bhf< does not stop at >Potsdam Bhf Park Sanssouci<.
Train connections from Potsdam Hbf (main station):
In addition to the RE1, both the trains RB20 (to >Oranienburg Bhf<) and RB21 (to either >Golm Bhf< or >Wustermark Bhf<) stop at >Potsdam Bhf Park Sanssouci<.
Bus lines to Campus Neues Palais
There are multiple bus lines coming in from Potsdam that have a stop on Campus Neues Palais. The bus station closest to the symposium venue is called >Neues Palais<.
Please consult the website of the joint public transportation system of Berlin and Potsdam (VBB) for an individual inquiry, and please consult the following individualized Google Maps for detailed directions.
Directions: Symposium Hotel to Symposium Venue (Tickets for public transport will be provided by hotel!)
Steigenberger Hotel Sanssouci
You can take buses 605 or 606 from Steigenberger Hotel Sanssouci - bus stop "Luisenplatz-Süd/Park Sanssouci" (605 direction: Potsdam, Wissenschaftspark Golm; 606 direction: Potsdam, Alt-Golm ) to Symposium Venue - Potsdam, Neues Palais (estimated time of arrival: 15 minutes).
Otherwise you can take the bus 695 from the bus stop "Potsdam, Luisenplatz-Nord/Park Sanssouci" (direction: Potsdam, Pirschheide Bhf) to Potsdam, Neues Palais (estimated time of arrival: 20 minutes).
Please consult the google maps below for details.
Campus map "Neues Palais"
Registration & Contact
There is no symposium fee, but please register until October 1st by sending us an E-Mail with your name and affiliation (if applicable).
Postcolonial Potsdam
Postcolonial Potsdam is offering a postcolonial tour of Park Sanssouci.
The tour will begin at 15:30 on October 10. We will meet outside the tourist information Park Sanssouci right on the edge of campus. You can see its location on the map below.
For you as conference participants, this will be free of charge.
Information on the tour:
https://postcolonialpotsdam.wordpress.com/tours/
For those of you staying at the conference hotel, our conference team member Sebastian Jablonski will be at the hotel reception at 15:00 and can accompany those who are going there directly from the hotel. Please make sure you are dressed for cold or wet weather (if applicable...). This is a walking tour of the park and can take about 1,5-2 hours.
Organizers:
Prof. Dr. Nicole WalleR
Dr. Hannah Spahn
Verena Adamik
Organizational team:
Sebastian Jablonski
Anja Söyünmez
Yasmin Künze
Imprint
Prof. Dr. Nicole Waller, Dr. Hannah Spahn, Verena Adamik
Campus Am Neuen Palais
Am Neuen Palais 10
Building 19, Room 0.16
14469 Potsdam
Germany