2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

Covering a wide historical terrain from the 1870s to the present, this panel considers African American migration in a broadened frame that includes image studies, histories of slavery, and histories of Black tourism. The panel is designed to help reconceive the notion of Black migration outside of the historical parameters of the Great Migration looking at it instead as a motif in the trajectory of the Black subject from Africa to the Atlantic sphere and within the United States context. It poses the question: what do "movement" narratives--of escaped slaves and of the African American family road trip--mean when understood in terms of the historiography and theory of Black migration?  The panel’s participants hail from different disciplines and methodological backgrounds but share a concern with innovating or re-conceptualizing the existing “archive” through which Black migration has been defined by focusing on the dialogue between image, subject, and mobility. This widened view of migration highlights the various contradictory forces that have motivated African American movement and the pursuit of freedom.