CALL FOR PAPERS
Multi-Session Workshop: Representing the Irrepresentable: Narratives and
Visual Images of Slavery, Forced Labor, and Genocide
127th American Historical Association Meeting
New Orleans, January 3 – 6, 2013
Convened by Ana Lucia Araujo (Department of History; Howard University,
Washington, DC)
This workshop will gather scholars working on written narratives
(documents, autobiographies, personal journals, novels, etc.) and visual
images (painting, drawings, photographs, engravings, movies, etc.) dealing
with forced displacement, enslavement, slavery, forced labor, war, and
genocide. The various participants will engage in understanding how the
multiple dimensions of traumatic human experiences can be conveyed through
images and narratives. How historians can examine written and visible
representations of irrepresentable events? Can narratives and images
provide reliable and/or accurate information for historians to interpret
traumatic dimensions of past and present human experience? How historians
articulate the use of eyewitness accounts (visual and written) with
fiction (novel, films) in order to represent past traumatic experiences?
What are the limits, the challenges, and the possibilities faced by
historians who employ narratives and images of trauma in their works? By
focusing on various historical periods and geographical areas, scholars
are invited to submit proposals addressing these questions and examining
specific case studies. Papers focusing on the Atlantic slave trade and
slavery, colonialism in Africa, the Holocaust, Nazi labor camps, the
Armenian genocide, the Apartheid, the Rwandan genocide, the war in Darfur,
contemporary slavery, and human trafficking, are welcome.
Please send your paper proposal no later than February 1st 2012 to: aaraujo@howard.edu or analucia.araujo@gmail.com
Paper proposals must contain:
– Paper’s title
– Abstract (up to 300 words)
– Biographical paragraph (up to 250 words, no curriculum vitae, please)
– Correct mailing and e-mail address
– Audiovisual needs, if any
Chairs and commentators, please send:
– Biographical paragraph (up to 250 words, no curriculum vitae, please)
– Correct mailing and e-mail addresses
Please note:
– Abstracts of accepted proposals will be posted on the AHA program website.
– Papers must be submitted on December 1st 2012 for the panel commentators.
ACRAH 