BGHRA 2025 CFP

Rekinning, Reckoning, and Justice

This year’s three-day, virtual event, Rekinning, Reckoning, and Justice, will be held on February 20-22, 2025 and will be free and open to the public. Our annual BGHRA Conference theme asks, what is next for us? what does justice look like? We wish to consider reparative justice and how, using this framework, we can reckon with state violence and displacement, as well as with family rupture. How are we healing?

The critical concept of rekinning: family and diaspora reconnection, in all its complexities, is glaringly ignored in the literature and public discourse though it is evident in a diversity of literary and artistic forms depicting individual Black experiences. It is also evinced in the nearly 30 years since the organization of the US-based Black German community.

The BGHRA’s inaugural conference, Strengthening Transatlantic Connections, was held in 2011 and celebrated the rekinning of Black German adoptees with their families and with the multicultural Black German communities in Germany. Since then, our conferences and public conversations have documented the importance and the immeasurable impacts of reconnecting with our families and with our globally situated communities within a multiplicity of contexts.

The BGHRA Review Committee invites proposals for panels and papers that engage the multiplicity and diversity of the powerful transcultural experiences and cultural production of Black people of German heritage, as well as those reflecting Black experiences throughout Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe.

We invite submissions for potential twenty-minute presentations on one of three academic panels, for presentations from graduate and undergraduate students delivered in poster format, or for participation in one of two sessions devoted to artistic and cultural activism, life writing, oral history, and memoir. Proposals for round table discussions, film screenings, and performances are also welcome.

Please send a 250-350 word abstract and a CV or short biographical statement by November 30, 2024, to info(at)bghra.org

Confirmations delivered by December 15, 2024.