CALL FOR PAPERS
Multi-Session Workshop: Representing the Irrepresentable: Narratives and Visual Images of Slavery, Forced Labor, and Genocide

127th American Historical Association Meeting; New Orleans, January 3 – 6, 2013

Convened by Ana Lucia Araujo (Department of History; Howard University, Washington, DC)

This workshop will gather scholars working on written narratives (documents, autobiographies, personal journals, novels, etc.) and visual images (painting, drawings, photographs, engravings, movies, etc.) dealing with forced displacement, enslavement, slavery, forced labor, war, and genocide. The various participants will engage in understanding how the multiple dimensions of traumatic human experiences can be conveyed through images and narratives. How historians can examine written and visible representations of irrepresentable events? Can narratives and images provide reliable and/ or accurate information for historians to interpret traumatic dimensions of past and present human experience? How historians articulate the use of eyewitness accounts (visual and written) with fiction (novel, films) in order to represent past traumatic experiences? What are the limits, the challenges, and the possibilities faced by historians who employ narratives and images of trauma in their works? By focusing on various historical periods and geographical areas, scholars are invited to submit proposals addressing these questions and examining specific case studies. Papers focusing on the Atlantic slave trade and slavery, colonialism in Africa, the Holocaust, Nazi labor camps, the Armenian genocide, the Apartheid, the Rwandan genocide, the war in Darfur, contemporary slavery, and human trafficking, are welcome.

Please send your paper proposal no later than February 1st 2012 to:

aaraujohoward.edu or analucia.araujogmail.com

Paper proposals must contain:

- Paper’s title

- Abstract (up to 300 words)

- Biographical paragraph (up to 250 words, no curriculum vitae, please)

- Correct mailing and e-mail address

- Audiovisual needs, if any

Chairs and commentators, please send:

- Biographical paragraph (up to 250 words, no curriculum vitae, please)

- Correct mailing and e-mail addresses

Please note:

- Abstracts of accepted proposals will be posted on the AHA program website.

- Papers must be submitted on December 1st 2012 for the panel commentators.

Ana Lucia Araujo
Associate Professor
Director of Graduate Studies
Howard University
Department of History
Frederick Douglass Memorial Hall
2441 6th Street N.W.
Room 316 B
Washington D.C.
United States
20059