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  • From the EditorsGlobal Black Consciousness
  • Margo Natalie Crawford and Salah M. Hassan

On May 11–12, 2014, the Global Black Consciousness international conference convened in Dakar, Senegal, cosponsored by the Institute for Comparative Modernities (Cornell University) and the Institute of African American Affairs (New York University). Held as part of the Dak'Art OFF program of the opening days of the Dakar Biennale (Dak'Art 2014), this two-day gathering brought together an array of literary scholars, art historians, visual art critics, artists, and diaspora theorists, with the aim of uncovering unknown dimensions of the art, culture, and politics tied to global black consciousness.

In our conference's call for papers, we framed our use of the word black as our desire to "think about both the promise and the problem of diasporic usages of 'black' as a unifying concept that pushes against global white supremacy." Now that we have such tremendous scholarship on particular identities shaped by the African diaspora (Afro-German, Black British, African American, Afro-Latina/o, Afro-Caribbean, and many more) and tremendous theories of the value and limits of Pan-Africanism, Afro-pessimism, and many other "isms," how do we create a space for the critical and nuanced analysis of global black consciousness as both a citing of diasporic flows and a grounded site of decolonizing movement? Hence, the conference aimed to explore the confluence between theories of diaspora and theories of decolonization. Consequently, several of the presentations at the conference explored the crisscrossing of visual art, literature, film, and other cultural productions, alongside the crosscurrents that shaped the transnational flow of black consciousness. Many participants in the conference situated their texts in the space of the crisscrossing that occurred as the Black freedom struggle became a layering of locations and dislocations and past, present, and future.

The 1960s and 1970s were our pivotal point, as we thought about the precursors and legacies of those eras of black freedom struggles. The occasion of Dak'Art and its theme, "To Produce the Common," allowed us to revisit major black and Pan-African intellectual collectivities in movements and festivals such as the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris, the 1959 Second Congress in Rome, the 1966 World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar (FESMAN), the 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival (PANAF) in Algiers, and the 1977 Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in Lagos, Nigeria. In addition, this focus allowed us to revisit individual artistic and intellectual work tied to Africa and the African diaspora. Our ultimate goal was to gather scholarship that opens up and complicates the key paradigms that have shaped the vibrant work on theories and cultural productions of the African diaspora.

The promise and problem of using the word black when organizing the gathering in Dakar became very clear when we realized that we could not use the word noir in the French translations of the conference program. Our competent translator and several of our colleagues who are French native speakers told us that the direct translation of our English program into French ("black" to "noir") would not work as well as translating "black" as "Africaine." The fear was that, in Senegal, the word black would signal a racial identification (not radical Pan-Africanism). We decided to use Africaine in the French conference programs and chose black for the English conference program. Nonetheless, this issue of translation shaped some of the most vibrant parts of the discussion during the first day of the conference.

This volume of Nka gained its wings during this 2014 conference, which was so crowded that the open-air, amphitheater-style venue had very few empty seats for the two days of its unfolding. The essays are a testament to the ongoing work of figuring out which words, which archives, and which theories make global black consciousness most legible, even when this global black consciousness remains the work of illegible resistance, aesthetics, and solidarity building. To broaden the coverage of issues related to our theme, we invited scholars beyond the participants to contribute essays that would augment the conference presentations and explore lesserknown events or topics. The essays are organized...

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