Call for Panelists for Southern Historical Association 2022, "“Southern History Now! Upheavals, Reckonings, and Reimaginings.”

Hello y’all,

My name is Sarah Richter, and I am an art history Phd Candidate at UIUC with a focus contemporary diasporic photography and performance art. I am interested in how contemporary artists disrupt linear time by bringing the past/memory into the present and visually demonstrating its continued socio-cultural influence.

I will be attending the Southern Historical Associations (SHA) 2022 annual conference, which will be held in Baltimore, Maryland from 10-13 November 2022. The theme for the conference is “Southern History Now! Upheavals, Reckonings, and Reimaginings.”

I would like to organize and propose a full panel that is centered around the overarching theme of arts relationship historical memory and how the past persists in its shaping of the present, specifically as it relates to Black women. This panel is tentatively title “Embodying the Shadow: Memory and History Beyond the Ledgers of Slavery.” 

This theme could lend itself not only to papers, but also the work of visual artists. Papers or performances focusing on contemporary performances of historical events such as rebellions and resistant, as well current socio-cultural issues in the south, focusing on histories ranging from the beginning of the slave trade to the America’s to the Civil Rights movements and the continued impacts of these today. I would like this theme to focus on the absences of women – not limited to, but focused on Black and Indigenous women – within these historical narratives, archives, and demonic ledgers from plantations and ships. My paper will focus on the 2014 series by contemporary artist Delphine Fawundu’s series “An Ode to Nat Turner: A Mende Woman on Nat Turner’s Plantation.” Returning to the site of Nat Turner’s Plantation, she performs as a Mende Woman to emphasize the important present that Black women have and continue to play in American life. 

Graduate students, performing artists, early career scholars, independent scholars across disciplines are all welcome! The deadline to submit a proposal is September 15, 2021, so please contact me before then if you are interested in being a part of this panel. I look forward to hearing from y’all and please feel free to contact me with any questions.