Contemplating Black Freedom(s): The Work and Legacy of Julie Saville

Focusing on the theme of freedom that was a prominent feature of the work of Julie Saville, Contemplating Black Freedom(s), will center the question of how people of African descent shaped the lived experience of freedom in the modern world.

 

Freedom has been imagined as whiggish in nature. That is to say, it is believed that freedom follows a historical path of inevitable, linear progress and improvement, and our access to freedom tends to expand over time. Yet, any review of our present moment in the first quarter of the twenty-first century has shown that the concept and lived experience of freedom has been wholly uneven and subject to potential reversals. In light of our collective, reoccurring reversals of freedom and the struggles by people of African descent to breathe life into the concept itself, this conference proposes to bring together scholars researching and developing new projects on the long history of black contributions to the shaping of the concept of freedom in order to better understand the historical antecedents of our present moment. Given our focus, conference presentations will collectively explore questions such as: What role did black people play in the emergence of freedom? Why was/is the problem of black freedom at the center of the transformations of the concept itself? What role did black women/gender play in the articulation of freedom? What is the future of black freedom? In asking questions about black freedom in the long project of modernity, we hope to illustrate the centrality of blackness to the essence of what it means to be free.