SAVE THE DATE - NOVEMBER 2ND, 2007

RECONSTRUCTING WOMANHOOD: A FUTURE BEYOND EMPIRE
A SYMPOSIUM CELEBRATING THE WORK OF HAZEL V. CARBY

Sulzberger Parlor, Barnard Hall, Barnard College,
Columbia University, New York, NY

Conference Schedule

9:30am
Welcome and Opening Remarks: Saidiya Hartman, Columbia University
**Coffee available to participants

10:00am
Keynote 1: "Paranoid Empire, Masculinities and Other War Zones"
               Anne McClintock, University of Wisconsin-Madison

11:15am
Keynote 2: "The Stranger's Work: Desire, Intimacy, Violence, and
Cultural
               Restoration"
               Robert Reid-Pharr, CUNY- Graduate Center

12:30
Lunch Break

2:00pm
Keynote 3:  "Reading and Reckoning Histories of Loss"
                Lisa Lowe, UC-San Diego/Yale University
(in-residence)
** Coffee available to participants

3:15pm
Keynote 4: "Reconstructing Manhood; or the Drag of Black
Masculinity"
               Rinaldo Walcott, University of Toronto

4:30pm
Closing Keynote: "Lost (and Found?) in Translation"
                Hazel V. Carby, Yale University

6:00pm
Reception

The symposium celebrates the 20th anniversary of Hazel Carby's
groundbreaking text, Reconstructing Womanhood, which traces the
emergence of the novel as a forum for political and cultural
reconstruction and examines the ways in which dominant racial and
sexual ideologies influenced the literary conventions of women's
fiction. The work of reconstruction announced by the title is
three-fold: it describes the efforts of nineteenth-century writers
and activists to redefine the meaning of womanhood and to challenge
the color-line that placed blacks outside the boundaries of the
human; it entails political efforts to transform and refashion the
state; and it encompasses the critical labor of imagining a future
beyond Man. Honoring the interdisciplinary significance of Carby's
scholarship in Literary and Cultural Studies, feminist theory,
critical race theory, Marxism, and post-colonial criticism, this
one-day symposium revisits the import of this work in relation to
an extended set of issues that include re-writing the human, the
production of disposable life, refashioning masculinities and queer
sexualities, and creating a world beyond empire.

The symposium is free but space is limited so please R.S.V.P. by
emailing fkb2104@columbia.edu.

The symposium has been made possible by the generous funding of the
following institutional partners:

Office of the Provost, Yale University; Institute for Research on
Women and Gender Studies, Columbia University; Women's Studies
Program, Duke University; Barnard Center for Research
on Women,Barnard College; Institute for Research in African American
Studies, Columbia University; Africana Studies, Barnard
College and Columbia University Libraries