Rutgers University-Newark brings the global Black Portraiture conference to Newark, NJ for the first time. In this moment of profound uncertainty, reconnection, and newfound creativity, the organizers of the Black Portraiture conferences invite the submission of abstracts summarizing a paper, panel, or performance related to the role of “play” in past and contemporary African Diasporic art, performance, liberation struggles, and cultural work. Play is a capacious term. It connotes leisure, desire, and jouit, or indicates musical or athletic virtuosity. Play can be liberatory as in racial masquerades or gender mimicry. But, it can also be oppressive as well. Pantomimes and minstrelsy have a racist history; while physical sites of play and public recreation have also been places of segregation and discrimination. More subversive types of play engage the absurd, the excessive, or the spectacular; and the term “play” itself can signify sexual power relations. At the same time, play, as in the...