Acknowledgments

So much of this project took place in auditoriums and lecture halls where I was invited to speak—that is, in both preparing these talks and fielding questions afterward, I was able to develop, revise, and edit my arguments. The list is long because the process was some six years in the making. I apologize in advance for failing to name all the personnel involved; my memory fails, but my gratitude does not. I would like to thank the following people and organizations for inviting me to come speak on this project: Professor Cally Waite and the Mellon Mays/SSRC Planning and Advisory Committee; Professor Susan Rice and the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Gender (CSREG) at Bucknell University; Professor Sara Lennox, organizer of the Race and the New Europe Lecture Series hosted by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Professor Lann Hornscheidt, organizer of the Zentrum für transdisziplinare Geschlechtsstudien (Center for Interdisciplinary Sexuality Studies) speaker series sponsored by Linköping University and Humboldt University; the organizers for the MESEA Symposium at Joensuu, Finland; Professors Peggy Pietsche and Fatima El-Tayeb and the second annual Black European Studies (BEST) conference; Professor Lynda Ng and the Rethinking Diaspora conference at Oxford University; Professors Nandini Bhattacharya and Mikko Tukkanen and the Bodies, Inc. symposium at Texas A&M University; Professors Salah M. Hassan and Dagmawi Woubshett and the Departments of African Studies and English at Cornell University; Professors Tyler Stovall, Trica D. Keaton, and Marcus Bruce, organizers of the Black France Colloquium sponsored by Reid Hall in Paris and Columbia University; Professors Werner Krauss and Ben Carrington, organizers of the Making Europe / Making Europeans Symposium held at the University of Texas at Austin; Professors Michelle Stephens and Melina Pappademos, hosts of the MARHO, Radical Historians Reconceptualization of the African Diaspora roundtable held at ASA; Professors Gesa Mackenthun, Nora Kreuzenbeck, Jürgen Martschukat, and Patricia Wiegmann, organizers of the “Being on the Move: Transfers, Emancipation and Formations of the Black Atlantic” conference hosted by University of Erfurt; Professor Charles Rowell, editor-in-chief of Callaloo and host for its thirtieth anniversary held in Baltimore, Maryland; Professor Laura Doyle, sponsor of the “Where Is Aqui?” roundtable held at ASA; Professors Pilar Cuder-Dominguez, Benedicte Ledent, and Mar Gallego, hosts of the “European Perspectives on the Black Atlantic” symposium sponsored by the University of Huelva, Spain; Professor Faith Adiele and the faculty of the 2012–13 Mills Contemporary Writers Series; Professor Sandra Jackson, director of the De Paul Center for Black Diaspora Studies and organizer of the 2009–10 speaker series; Professor Badia Ahad and the Department of English at Loyola University Chicago; Professor Eva Boesenberg and the Department of English and American Studies at Humboldt University, sponsors of the annual W. E. B. Du Bois Lecture Series; Professor Maria Diedrich and the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Münster; the Fulbright Distinguished Speaker Series cohosted by the University of Leipzig and University of Jena; Professors Darlene Clark Hine and Trica Keaton, organizers of the Black Europe and the African Diaspora conference hosted by Northwestern University; Professor Daylanne English, organizer of the Afrofuturism panel at the 2011 ASA conference; Professor Jean-Paul Rocchi, organizer of the Textual Dissensions and Political Dissidence in Identity Construction symposium hosted by the University of Paris VII; and Professor Donna Gabaccia, organizer of the 2007–8 Global, Race, Ethnicity and Migration lecture series, hosted by the Immigration History Research Center (of which Professor Gabaccia was also director) at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.

I would also like to thank Professors Daylanne English, Rod Ferguson, E. Patrick Johnson, and Nikki Brown for their friendship and encouragement; Professor Fatima El-Tayeb for her inspirational work, most recently and exceptionally European Others; the late Professor Richard Iton for reading through the manuscript’s introduction and providing me with such detailed and encouraging notes; Professor Daniel Stolarski, part of the CERN research team, also for reading the introduction to comment on its deployment of principles in physics—any inaccuracies in this book are of course my own; Professor Laura Doyle for taking time away from an exceptionally busy schedule to read through a truly mangled book proposal and offer such cogent and productive insights; Professor Berndt Ostendorf for inviting me to spend a year as a Fulbright scholar at LMU in Munich, which provided me with crucial time to begin my research, and to his lovely wife, Jutta, whose warmth, hospitality, insight, and wit made our stay so thoroughly memorable. Great thanks to my undergraduate research assistant, Myrtie Williams, for helping me clean up errors and clarify arguments in the first draft and to Dr. William Barnett of Wordcraft, whose ability to edit everything from the incorrect use of an intransitive verb, to the process that turns coal into diamonds, to key nuances between theories such as epiphenomenalism and Munchhausen’s Trilemma and my own arguments proved invaluable to this rather demanding, broadly ranging manuscript. My deepest thanks to editorial assistant Erin Warholm-Wohlenhaus and Richard Morrison, former editorial director of the University of Minnesota Press, who picked up on this project at an extremely early date and in its most ungainly form—and supported it throughout. Finally, I must thank my partner, Virginia May Nugent, for seeing me through yet another book project, chiding me when I was discouraged, cheering me when I was despondent, and for always, no matter the circumstance, being that engaged listener.