The European Union Center is pleased to share the program for its 14th Illinois EU Studies Conference on April 18-19, 2024. The conference theme is "Paradigms of Racialization: Alternative Sources." This conference is part of a multi-year project that aims to deprovincialize the perspective provided by Critical Race Theory and test its assumptions within the multiracial and multicultural context of the pre-modern and postmodern Mediterranean, before and after the emergence of racial regimes.

Funded by a Transatlantic Research Partnership grant from the Albertine Foundation (formerly FACE Foundation), "Paradigms of Racialization: Alternative Sources" is co-organized by the European Union Center in collaboration with Claire Bourhis Mariotti (Associate Professor of African American History, University of Paris 8-Paris Lumières) and Mauro Nobili (Associate Professor of History, UIUC). For more information on the project, please see here.

Sponsors: Albertine Foundation; European Union Center at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; TransCrit at University Paris 8; Digital Islamic Studies Curriculum (DISC) at University of Michigan; Center for African Studies at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 

Conference Program

Venue: 300 Levis Faculty Center, 919 W Illinois St, Urbana, IL 61801

Day 1 – April 18, 2024

9:00 Welcome Remarks by the organizers

9:30-12:00 Panel One – Alternative Sources from the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds

Chair: Heather Duncan, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Presenters:

• Brian Sandberg, Northern Illinois University: “Sources of Islamophobia in Early Modern France and the Mediterranean World.”
• Said Bousbina, independent researcher, and Mauro Nobili, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: “When Ahmad al-Manṣûr announces the conquest of the ‘Land of the Blacks.’”
• Cord Whitaker, Wellesley College: “Forbidden Love: Medieval Romance as Critical Race Studies Archive.”
• Craig Koslofsky: “Dermal marking, Whiteness, and Racialization: Tattooed Servants, Soldiers, and Sailors in the British Atlantic World, c. 1680 to 1750”

12:00-14:00 Lunch Break

14:00 – 16:00 Panel Two – Race and Racialization in Islamic Perspective

Chair: TBD

Presenters:

• Jonathan Brown, Georgetown University: The Tanbīh al-ṭughyān ʿalā ḥurriyyat al-sūdān: The Argument of a Late-Nineteenth/Early-Twentieth-Century Rebuttal of Views on Race and Slavery in Morocco.”
• Bruce Hall, University of California, Berkeley: “Race and decolonization in Africa: Muḥammad Maḥmūd ould al-Shaykh’s history of Timbuktu and the Azawad.”
• Ismael Montana, Northern Illinois University: “Interrogating al-Timbuktawi’s Blacks of Tunis in Nineteenth Century-Tunisia: Racial Others or Enslavable Infidels?”
• Khaled Esseissah: “The Racial and Cultural Construction of Blackness and Whiteness in the Nineteenth-Century Sahara (now Mauritania)”

16:00-16:30 Coffee break

16:30-18:00 Keynote & Q&A

Yacine Daddi Addoun, University of Kansas: “Race, Color and Slavery: A Perspective from Algeria”

Moderator: Erik McDuffie, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Day 2– April 19, 2024

9:30-11:00 Panel Three: Race and racism in TV series, Hollywood Movies and Films

Chair: Markian Dobczansky, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Presenters:

• Flavia Ciontu, Université Paris 8: “The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness: Perspectives from Eastern Europe.”
• Sébastien Lefait, Aix-Marseille Université: “Introducing New Sources to Understand Hollywood’s Biased Treatment of Racism in the US.”
• Damani Partridge, University of Michigan: “The Future as Archive: Noncitizen Films from Detroit, Philadelphia, and Berlin.”

11:00-11:30 Coffee break

11:30-13:00 Panel Four – (Moving) images

Chair: TBD

Presenters:

• Juliette Bourdin, University Paris 8: “Dehumanizing the Chinese to justify their exclusion: the example of George Frederick Keller’s cartoons in the San Francisco Wasp (1876-1883)”
• Amanda Smith, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: “Race-ing Through Time: An Analysis of Black Women’s Bodies in French History and Now”
• Vincenzo Bavaro, Università di Napoli: “Navigating Shadows: Black Actors in Blackface – A Study of Identity and Representation in Early Hollywood”

13:00-14:30 Lunch Break

14:30-16:00 Panel Five – The Public and Private in Writing History

Chair: TBD

Presenters:

• Augustin Habran, Université d’Orléans: “‘He came a long way to see his white brothers the Cherokees and the Creeks’: Indian Territory and the making of Cherokee racial legitimacy in the journal of Elijah Hicks.”
• Lawrence Aje, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier: “Re-membering: filling the archival voids of the history of slavery with prosopography.”
• Claire Bourhis-Mariotti, University Paris 8: “‘The fact is, the Saxon and negro are the only positive races on this continent, and the two are destined to absorb into themselves all the others.’ Black Nationalist-Emigrationists’ Paradigm of Race: the Black Manifest Destiny?”

16:00-17:30 Workshop: selection of primary sources to be included in the final deliverable.

Chairs: Claire Bourhis-Mariotti and Mauro Nobili