RACE, SPACE, PLACE:
THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF FREEDOMS IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD AND BEYOND
INTERDISCIPLINARY CONVERSATIONS
APRIL 13TH - 14TH, 2007
JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN CENTER
A Symposium: Background and Vision
The question of freedom has received much attention in the context of the exercise of power aimed at securing modern liberties and citizenship, an attention that, of course, also extends to its related tropes of ‘human rights,’ ‘security,’ ‘development,’ and even ‘competitiveness’ given today’s neo-liberal world. But while these questions of freedom continue to clamor for our attention—especially given the debates surrounding the demise, diminution, relegation, or subversion of the sovereignties of nation-states from East to West, and the contemporary crises and confusion of political events marking Haiti’s long march to freedom—the manifold conversations in response express a continued fragmentation, dissensus, even antagonism, of attitudes, orientations and analytical perspectives on these modern experiences of power and freedom. Indeed, there has been no new epiphany or convergence of wisdom in sight on this vexing issue for states, individuals, communities and ‘societies,’ despite the argued centrality of these questions of freedom to the very stability of the expansionist capitalist world economy in the Atlantic World and Beyond.
These experiences of modern power and the question of freedom have been first played out however in the context of the relational multidimensionality of Atlantic world history. Thus one may observe the relationality within the interstices of Atlantic regions, e.g., the rise and/or persistence of the slavery complex in Cuba and its ‘coincidence’ of decline on other Caribbean islands, in South America and the US South. In more recent times, since the 1980s, (marking the ascendance of a neo-liberal globalization), the relationality expresses itself in the demise of the banana and sugar industries in the Anglophone Caribbean, and their expansion, particularly the former, in Latin America. The extension of Atlantic grounded and specifically modern concerns of ‘freedom’ to other spaces, races and places alerts us then to the idea of a ‘relationality of being’ culturally evolving across linked geographies at intersecting times. That is to say, the historical exercise of modern social power has given rise to particular intersections of geographies, spaces and places and sociocultural interlocutions and trans-locations of people. This has forced a need for a continuous re-examination of the iterative constitution of freedoms and unfreedoms in a modern Atlantic and world economy constantly in a state of flux.
Among the questions that the symposium participants will grapple are the following:
- How do interlinked Atlantic places and spaces within, become transformed into spaces and places of belonging, rest, settlement?
- What kinds of imaginations of freedom and unfreedom are woven into these making of places as articulations of home or spaces of settling, unsettling and re-settling in the hope of ‘modern freedom’ and how?
- What kinds of agencies and ‘movements’ articulate and are articulated in the flows of bodies (social and material) and lives ( as subjects and objects) re/presenting spaces as homes, places as homelands?
- Why exactly and how, do those practices of and movements for home staking and dwelling become transformed into movements of violating/profaning and leaving as well?
- How do these sorts of practices and movements elaborate on the making of modern S/subjects and even the sorts of claims that can be anticipated on ‘citizenship’?
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