Please join the European Union Center 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. The full conference program can be found here.
Day 1 Schedule
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: Kenneth M. Cuno, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
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: “Race, Color and Slavery: A Perspective from Algeria”
Presenter: Yacine Daddi Addoun, Ibadica, Centre for Studies and Research on Ibadism
Chair: Erik McDuffie, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
