Leigh Raiford - Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture

Acknowledgments

This collection took shape in a four-day symposium marked by intellectual rigor and generosity, by risk-taking and community building. We would like to thank the Volkswagen Foundation for this opportunity that provided us with the chance to develop our ideas in person in the beautiful surroundings of the castle of Herrenhausen in Hannover, Germany; we are especially grateful to Cornelia Soetbeer and Margot Jckel. A number of symposium participants, whose written work is not represented here, were wonderful interlocutors: Thank you, Tina Campt, Nana Adusei-Poku, Courtney Baker, Erica James, Tobe Levin, Alanna Lockward, Amna Malik, Sylvester Ogbechie, Ilka Saal, Sema Kara, and Cathy Covell Waegner. A special thanks goes to John Jennings for his magnificent poster design.

As the symposium became book, we were fortunate to work with Larin McLaughlin, Whitney Johnson, Jacqueline Volin, Caroline Knapp, and the attentive and highly professional staff at the University of Washington Press. We are grateful as well to the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful readings and general enthusiasm for the volume.

We have had truly supportive home teams at our respective university departments that have ushered this project through all its many stages. Catrin Gersdorf, Eva Hedrich, and Karin Kernahan at the University of Wrzburg, Germany deserve a special thank you here. This volume would not have made it to the finish line without the yeomans labor of our marvelous student assistants, Asia Mott of UC-Berkeley and Molina Klingler at the University of Wrzburg (hopefully, one day you two will meet in person).

Our families had to endure many Skype sessions at odd hours and family activity times with us showing up late. Yet, their lively participation in their own ways in the making of the symposium and the book has enriched our work, and our affectionate thanks go to Michael, Maya, Maceo, Don, Markus, Jakob, and Jonathan.

From the start, this project has valued the work of the collective and collaborative in producing as well as articulating a diasporic intellectual formation, and worked to recognize the African Diaspora across differenceof academic discipline, of geo-historical identity, and of visual cultural media.