Conference Description

13th CPC Africana Studies Conference, March 30-31, 2007

Interrogating Issues of Citizenship, Identity, Ethnicity, and Race
in Africa and the African Diaspora, 150 Years after the Dred Scott Decision 

with related art exhibition running March 30-April 22, 2007
Negotiating Identities in Africa and the African Diaspora

Other conference highlights:
Schedule of Events
Musical Performance: Dominic Kanza and the African Rhythm Machine
Keynote Speech by Dr. Paul Finkelman
Keynote Video
Closing Speech by Dr. Al Brophy
Closing Video 

For the last twelve years the colleges of the Central Pennsylvania Consortium have annually held an Africana studies conference.  In 2004, when Gettysburg College last hosted the conference, the conference evolved from a small CPC conference to an intimate international gathering of specialists and students of Africana studies.  Papers and art from that conference are presently being edited for the production of a special issue of the International Journal of Africana Studies.

It is appropriate and fitting that the CPC Africana Studies which will interrogate issues of Citizenship, Identity, Ethnicity and race takes place at Gettysburg college, a college founded by abolitionists at a place forever scarred by the very struggle for full citizenship.  Fifteen years after the college had opened its doors Dred Scott, an African American, sued for his freedom from slavery. After ten years, in 1857 the United States Supreme court decided in an opinion written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney (Dickinson College Valedictorian 1795) that all people of African ancestry both free and slave could never become citizens of the United States of America and thus not sue in Federal court.  This decision had an important impact on the politics of the United States and the issue of slavery here and in other slave owning countries of the New World.

The aim of this conference will be to look at both contemporary and historical issues of citizenship, identity, ethnicity and race in the African World, a 150 years after the Dred Scott decision.  The legal struggle for citizenship that Dred Scott underwent from 1847 to 1857 has been repeated in different forms across the African world: 

• in the obvious legal and extra-legal struggles of the African majority in South Africa for full citizenship and democracy;
• in the contemporary struggle of women of African descent everywhere to be considered full citizens in both the letter of the law and spirit;
• in the struggles of the people of Darfur to be considered full citizens of Sudan;
• inthe struggles of African people in Europe for citizenship and identity;
• and in various stuggles of the African peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean such as the Garifuna, the Black Nicaraguans of the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua, and the Afro-Mexicans of the Costa Chica.

The intention of the organizers is to draw artists and academics to investigate various aspects of the issues from disciplinary and inter/multi disciplinary perspectives at both the national and transnational levels.  The expectation of the conference organizers is that the contributions to the conference will then be published in an edited volume.

Highlights of the 2004 CPC Africana Studies Conference at Gettysburg College