Call for Papers
“Race and the Post-Civil Rights South”
March 28-29, 2007
University of Memphis

The Scholars in Critical Race Studies (SCRS) at University of Memphis seek submissions for their second annual colloquium. Please send all inquiries or proposals to: lduck@memphis.edu. The deadline for 250-500 word abstracts of 30-minute papers is January 12, 2007. Selected papers will be published in a special issue of the journal Patterns of Prejudice.

Scholars affiliated with the SCRS examine the historical evolution and contemporary expression of race as a social category for discriminating, organizing, regulating and maintaining social differences. By revealing that racial categories emerge in specific contexts connected to power, politics, economics and culture, these scholars destabilize those categories as natural or transhistorical. The point is to disclose how race operates in differing situations and texts, in order to undermine the force of racism. The SCRS is an interdisciplinary forum that seeks to facilitate a conversation by scholars across the humanities and social sciences, including Philosophy, Literature, History, Foreign Languages, Political Science, Sociology, Anthropology, and Jewish Studies.

This colloquium is made possible by the generosity of the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change, the Bornblum Judaic Studies Center, the Office of Extended Programs, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Women’s Studies Program at The University of Memphis. It will be held at the National Civil Rights Museum and the University of Memphis.

Submissions are welcome in the following categories, but the suggested topics below are by no means exclusive. We particularly welcome contributors from the extended Mid-South region (Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Missouri, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Arkansas).

• What constitutes the “post-civil rights” era? To what extent is an appeal to rights still useful?
• The meaning of racial solidarity in the post-civil rights era
• The roles of race, class, and gender in the post-civil rights era
• Non-African American voices in post-civil rights struggle
• Coalition building in the post-civil rights era
• Ideas of hope and hopelessness in the face of persistent racism
• Expressions of and responses to racism within material and intangible heritage
• How do anti-racist struggles in the contemporary U.S. South—or, for that matter, the previous “Jim Crow” South—parallel, inform, or participate in other aspects of national, postcolonial, or global activism?