In the 1960s, one attended the emergence in the United States a movement that came to be known as the Black Arts Movement. According to its founders, the assimilation of the African- American would unquestionably go through loss of identity; hence their quest for sovereignty. In the course of time, however, it appeared that in the absence of an international footprint and approving conscience, the BAM would be short-lived and sovereignty sheer utopia. At this juncture myriad African-American singers, musicians, writers, poets, playwrights, and political activists like the Black Panthers, influenced by Algeria’s War of Independence; the meeting of Algeria’s Premier Ben Bella with Dr Martin Luther King in New York and W. E. Dubois in Accra, and by one of the architects of the war, Frantz Fanon etc., saw to attend the First Pan- African Festival, organized and hosted in Algiers by the OAU president, Houari Boumediene.
Topics but not limited:
I. Segregation and Colonialism
James Baldwin on Justice/Injustice in the Algerian Context
Dr. Martin Luther King and Ahmed Ben Bella: “Linking Two Injustices”
Ben Bella, W. E. Dubois and Pan-Africanism
II. The Emergence of the Black Arts Movement Negroes with Pens: Male Novelists/Female Novelists/Musicians/Playwrights etc
“Negroes with Guns”: The Black Panther Party for Self- Defense
III. The Black Arts Movement in Algeria Connecting Roots: Algeria and the First Pan-African Festival
Algeria’s Frantz Fanon and the Coining of Black Power The Revolutionaries: The Black Panther Party in Algeria The Cultural Nationalists: Emory Douglas/ Archie Shepp Nina Simone etc.
IV. Assessing the Role of Algeria and the Future of the Black Arts Movement
The Afropolitan Experience Afro-Centrism Afro-Futurism/ Black Panther Film/Afro- defeatism
V. Assessing the 1960s and 1970s
Are the Sixties and Seventies impacting today’s world? Is travelling back to the 1960s and 1970s but sheer nostalgia?
Can we consider the 1960s as a short-lived turmoil or a starting point for reforms in the short and long range? Are the visions/expectations of the 1960s and 1970s being countered?

Participants are invited to send a 250-300 word abstract by September 30, 2018, Research accompanied by a max two- page long cv to:
abdeldjallil.larbiyoucef@univ-mosta.dz
abbesbahous@yahoo.fr
yasmina.kdjafri@gmail.com