September 17-18, 2004
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Since Columbus’s first western encounters, the Atlantic world has seen the creation of numerous identities. These new forms of individual and shared selfhood produced, with astonishing speed and sometimes terrible violence, vast new empires. These identities have been shaped by trans-Atlantic transformations of race, religion, language, gender, class, science, commerce, region, and nation, and each has presented new ways of answering the old questions: “Who am I?” “Who are we?” “Who are you?” and perhaps most perilously, “What are you to us?”
Our conference invites papers by both literary scholars and historians who examine the varied forces which forged new identities among the communing and colliding inhabitants of the “Atlantic rim”—of the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. In particular we will explore how new identity creation enabled these peoples to imagine and enact not only the common bonds of civil society, but also the bondage of subjugation and slavery, and sometimes the opposition to that bondage.
As an interdisciplinary meeting organized by historians and literary scholars, our conference will attend equally to history and to story: that is, to issues of documentary evidence and to the creative models through which we read this evidence; to the events and to the tales that often shaped the events; and to continuing problems of narrative history and of literary historicism. To promote interdisciplinary connections more fully, we plan as much as possible to mix literary and historical papers in our concurrent sessions. We invite individual submissions and full panels dealing with identity and empire throughout the “Atlantic rim,” both in the Anglo-American, Iberian and Francophone worlds, and also among Africans and Native Americans.
The conference will be held in the beautiful new Elliott University Center, a state-of-the-art facility on the UNCG campus in the heart of Greensboro, an historic city which has witnessed the Revolutionary Battle of Guilford Courthouse in 1781, the collapse of the Confederate cabinet in 1865, and the birth of the Sit-In Movement in 1960.
Featured Speakers:
(Click link at left for details)
- Ira Berlin, The University of Maryland
- Barry Gaspar, Duke University
- Stephen J. Greenblatt, Harvard University