Robert Winslow Blunt

The rationale of this workshop is to hold a gathering of interdisciplinary scholars at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, to address the question of the nighttime as a specific temporality and social context for the making of African cultural life. Entitled ‘The Night in Question,’ it promises to be the first workshop of its kind on this particular topic held in the United States. Co-hosted by a cultural anthropologist and a historian, the general objective of this workshop is to treat the nighttime in a more focused manner as both a temporal context for cultural practice as well as a cultural “object” and historical formation in its own right. This workshop consequently aims to work against an implicit bias toward the daytime as the principal temporality in which societies are made. It also intends to demonstrate how the nighttime itself is shaped by cultural practices and historical processes. The workshop will consist of fourteen scholars, the majority anthropologists, who will present concept pieces based on their regional and topical expertise. The workshop will take place over two days and be divided into three panels addressing anthropological, historical, and theoretical perspectives. A special issue of the journal _History and Anthropology_ is planned. In sum, this workshop intends to bring attention to this ubiquitous, yet largely neglected, aspect of the human experience.