Rupture, Repression, and Uprising
Raced and Gendered Violence Along the Color Line
APRIL 3-5, 2008
Conference sponsored by the
African American Studies & Research Program
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 urban racial pogroms, often backed by white police and governmental authority, were part of a long-term project of black subjugation, one that 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 countermovements; 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 aasrp@uiuc.edu.
For general questions or information, please contact Jennifer Hamer or Lou Turner at aasrp@uiuc.edu or 217.333.7781. You may also visit the website.
