A Is for Anansi: Literature for Children of African Descent
November 9, 2012 - November 10, 2012
A Is for Anansi: Literature for Children of African Descent
“Africa, the Future, and the Urban Landscape”
November 9th-10th, 2012
NYU Kimmel Center
“Why do I love children? I think it is because the child in each of us is our most precious part.”
─Walter Dean Myers from Brown Angel: An Album of Picture and Verse
“My work requires me to think about how free I can be as an AfricanAmerican women writer in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world. To think about (and wrestle with) the full implications of my situation leads me to consider what happens when other writers work in a highly and historically racialized society. For them, as for me, imagination is not merely looking or looking at; nor is it taking oneself intact into the other. It is, for the purposes of the work, becoming.”
─Toni Morrison from Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
PROGRAM / PANELS
Friday evening, November 9th
● Perceptions and Realities: When Color Blinds and Reveals
Perceptions of how notions of whiteness/blackness, both implicit and implied, are presented and their effects. Borrowing a page from Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, whiteness and blackness in the literary imagination.
All day Saturday, November 10th
● Fantasy: The Final Frontier
The scarcity of fantasy/science-fiction books featuring children of African decent
● Urban Landscape: Stories for a Global World, Realism and Dominant Images
The lure of urban life and culture, its offerings and sacrifices. What the urban landscape does to the literature and vice versa. How the black urban experience is interpreted and reimagined. How does dwindling rural development and shifts to urban landscapes fragment and reconstruct lives and cultural retentions?
● Children’s panel: “If I Ruled the World” (tentative title)
As a teacher / publisher / writer / reader how they see themselves in the world and how they are depicted. If they were in control and in power/what would they teach, assign to read, defending it why and why not.
● Africa Imagined
“What is Africa to me” remains a fundamental question in all Africana studies. How African culture is identified, constructed in the literature.