Imagining Futurities: A Symposium in Honor of Hazel Carby

Over the course of her career, including her thirty years as a faculty member at Yale, Hazel Carby has produced a body of scholarship that has profoundly shaped the intellectual contours of American studies, Black studies, cultural studies, and studies of colonialism and empire. From Reconstructing Womanhood to Cultures in Babylon and Imperial Intimacies, her work has redefined how we understand the intersections of race, gender, empire, and diaspora. Her work has insisted on the centrality of materialist frameworks and transnational analysis to the humanities. This two-day gathering of scholars from African American and African diaspora literary, history, and cultural studies, the arts and material cultures of British colonialism and empire, and Black feminisms offers an opportunity to honor the depth and reach of her contributions.

Participants include Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Princeton), Vincent Brown (Yale), Tina Campt (Princeton), Anthony Foy (Swarthmore), Marisa Fuentes (Rutgers), Adom Getachew (University of Chicago), Tao Leigh Goffe (Hunter), Jennifer Greeson (University of Virginia), Sarah Haley (Columbia), Saidiya Hartman (Columbia), Eli Jelly-Schapiro (University of South Carolina), Khalil Anthony Johnson (Wesleyan), Katherine McKittrick (Queen’s University), Leigh Raiford (UC Berkeley), Sandhya Shukla (University of Virginia), Michelle Stephens (Rutgers), Deborah Thomas (University of Pennsylvania), Ivy Wilson (Northwestern), and poet Natasha Trethewey.

Friday, November 6, 2:30–7:30 pm
Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel St.

2:30–3:45 pm
Hazel Carby, Tina Campt, and Deborah Thomas in Conversation

5:30–6:30 pm
Poetry Reading by Natasha Trethewey

6:30–7:30 pm
Reception

Saturday, November 7, 9:30 am–5:15 pm
Humanities Quadrangle, lower level
320 York Street

9:30 am
Welcome

10:00–11:15 am
Roundtable I: Imperial Intimacies and the Dialectics of Global Diasporas
Khalil Johnson, moderator
Vincent Brown, Adom Getachew, Marisa Fuentes, and Sandhya Shukla

11:30 am–12:45 pm
Roundtable II: Feminisms, Comparative Colonialisms and Racial Relation
Michelle Stephens, moderator
Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Tao Leigh Goffe, Sarah Haley, and Katherine McKittrick

Lunch

2:30–3:45 pm
Roundtable III: Cultural Studies, Art, and the Production of Knowledge
Leigh Raiford, moderator
Anthony Foy, Jennifer Greeson, Eli Jelly-Schapiro, and Ivy Wilson

4:00–5:15 pm
Saidiya Hartman and Hazel Carby in Conversation

Sponsored by the Whitney Humanities Center; Yale Center for British Art; the 320York Fund, Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration; the departments of Black Studies and American Studies; and the programs in Ethnicity, Race and Migration and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies