Carole Boyce-Davies
Gains and Losses Towards a Decolonized Literary Curriculum
Carole Boyce-Davies is Professor of African Diaspora Literatures and chair of the Department of Literature and Writing at Howard University. As Professor of Africana Studies and Literatures in English (2007-2024) she was also appointed to the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters endowed chair at Cornell University. From 1997 to 2007 where she is now Professor Emerita. From 1997-2006, she served as Professor and Director of African New World Studies at Florida International University where she launched the first M.A. in African Diaspora Studies in the US. She is the author of the prize-winning Left of Karl Marx. The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (2008); Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994); Caribbean Spaces. Escape Routes from Twilight Zones (2013) and Black Women’s Rights. Leadership and the Circularities of Power (2022). In addition to over a hundred essays, articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries and op eds, she has also edited or co-edited thirteen critical editions of literary, Black feminist, and African Diaspora scholarship.
Robert McRuer
The Crip Camp Yet to Come: Crossing Borders with Queer/Crip Theory
Robert McRuer is a writer and speaker whose work is situated at the intersections of the interdisciplinary fields of disability studies and queer theory. His award-winning 2006 book Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability has been translated into three languages. Currently, he is a Professor of English at George Washington University, where he teaches queer theory, disability studies, and critical theory more generally. His most recent book, Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance, was released in January 2018. Crip Times considers locations of disability within contemporary political economies and the roles that disabled movements and representations play in countering hegemonic forms of globalization. His first book, The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities, centered on contemporary lgbt writers, particularly lgbt writers of color, and his second book, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, attended to cultural sites where critical queerness and disability contest heteronormativity and compulsory able-bodiedness.
Roundtable Discussion
Academic Freedom under Attack: Transgenerational Perspectives on Contemporary Transatlantic American Studies
Participants:
- Ingrid Gessner (Vorarlberg University of Education)
- Walter Grünzweig (Andrássy University Budapest)
- Cornelia Klecker (University of Innsbruck)
- Juliann Knaus (Karl-Franzens University Graz)
- Heike Paul (Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg)
- Markus Schwarz (Paris Lodron University of Salzburg)
Chair: Alexandra Ganser (University of Vienna)
On his first day as President of the United States of America, Donald Trump signed over 200 executive orders—attacking, for instance, not only birthright citizenship or laws ensuring the safety of transgender people, but also the U.S. education system by targeting diversity and inclusion or the teaching of critical race theory, LatinX and border studies, or gender and queer studies. Academic and educational freedom—at all educational levels—is being strategically undermined and denigrated as “radical” and “wasteful” (see Executive Order “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing”). As the AAAS has always been committed to academic freedom, also with regard to transatlantic academic exchange, and to supporting the voices of women, sexual/gender minorities, immigrants, BIPOC and people with disabilities, among others, we cannot ignore these developments. It is our professional responsibility to be critical and vigilant, to take an explicit stance against the current infringement on human rights, and to insist on democratic freedoms like the freedom of speech and research. The roundtable discussion addresses these issues from different geographical and generational perspectives, inquiring into our agency, roles, and research practices as Americanists in Europe deeply concerned with the autocratic developments we are currently witnessing in the United States.