Associate Professor of Africana Studies Donald Carter participated in the panel "Old and New Minorities in Europe" at the American Anthropologist Association meeting in Philadelphia on Dec. 3. His paper was titled "Breaking the Visible Barrier: Invisibility, Belonging and the Long March to Humanity."
According to the abstract, "Ralph Ellison once suggested that people be allowed to recognize themselves as themselves despite what others may believe them to be, a vigilant and impassioned call to seek balance amid the countervailing and discursive tensions of social erasure and the integrity and autonomy of an affirming subjectivity. In contemporary Europe many newcomers hope to create a place for themselves in a social world that at times relegates them to invisibility. And yet a new Europe carefully envisioned may offer an equitable cultural space for those thrown together by circumstance, postcolonial conditions and global capitalism. This new convergence of fortunes may present an opportunity for both newcomer and the established to exploit the ambiguity in the process and nature of European self-representation. Europeans old and new may transform established conventions by inhabiting a now potential social ontology. The paper explores social invisibility of Senegalese in Italy and the struggle to envision blackness in Europe, along with the volatile emergence of race in social imagination and belonging."
According to the abstract, "Ralph Ellison once suggested that people be allowed to recognize themselves as themselves despite what others may believe them to be, a vigilant and impassioned call to seek balance amid the countervailing and discursive tensions of social erasure and the integrity and autonomy of an affirming subjectivity. In contemporary Europe many newcomers hope to create a place for themselves in a social world that at times relegates them to invisibility. And yet a new Europe carefully envisioned may offer an equitable cultural space for those thrown together by circumstance, postcolonial conditions and global capitalism. This new convergence of fortunes may present an opportunity for both newcomer and the established to exploit the ambiguity in the process and nature of European self-representation. Europeans old and new may transform established conventions by inhabiting a now potential social ontology. The paper explores social invisibility of Senegalese in Italy and the struggle to envision blackness in Europe, along with the volatile emergence of race in social imagination and belonging."
