All Day Conference
Friday, 17 March 2006
The Graduate Center of the City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York

In the wake of the 2000 U.S. Census, the media was filled with headlines declaring that Latinos “outnumbered” African Americans, 35.3 and 34.7 million respectively, replacing them as the largest “minority” in the United States. According to these same census figures, “17.6 million Hispanics described themselves as white, 939,471 Hispanics described themselves as black, and 16.7 million checked off neither white nor black but “other.” These census figures represent the manner in which some Latinos, when asked to specify their racial identity, privilege their European and indigenous ancestry over their African heritage. As historian George Reid Andrews notes in Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000, “during the period of slavery, ten times as many Africans came to Spanish and Portuguese America (5.7 million) as to the United States (560,000). By the end of the 1900s, Afro-Latin Americans outnumbered Afro-North Americans by three to one (110 million and 35 million, respectively) and formed, on average, almost twice as large a proportion of their respective populations” (22 percent in Latin America, 12 percent in the United States) (1). It is understood here that Spanish and Portuguese America also includes the Hispanophone Caribbean, as Andrews’ maps of Afro-Latin America indicate. Implicit in our use of the 2000 census statistics is the awareness that a significant percentage of those 35.3 million Latina/o(s) are the descendants and immigrants of the Afro-Latin American Diaspora.

The 19th century Cuban poet, critic, and revolutionary José Martí declared that “any enemy of the Black man is the enemy of me” in recognition of the centrality of Africa to TransAmerican culture and identity; following Martí, our conference seeks to identify, interrogate, and ignite discourse and dialogue on African, Afro-Latino, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latin American, and Afro-American cultural and political histories that may, in turn, acknowledge the formidable potential of such linkages in the face of our shared histories of oppression and resistance.

Continuing our work from the 2004 Black Feminisms and 2005 Black Masculinities Conference, the African Studies Group (ASG) and the Institute for Research in the African Diaspora and the Caribbean (IRADAC), both of the City University of New York’s Graduate School and University Center, seek papers that will contribute to the identification and articulation of the socio-cultural and geo-political correlations inherent to these multifarious diasporas. Activists, artists, and undergraduates are encouraged to submit papers. We also invite papers in Spanish, French, and Portuguese.

Topics may include but are not limited to: