[UPDATE] Graduate Student Conference in Transnational American Studies Deadline Extension to 3/19/2010
Conference Title: Shifting Tides, Anxious Borders: A Graduate Student Conference in Transnational American Studies
Location: Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY
Dates: April 23-24, 2010
Keynote Speaker: Donald E. Pease, Avalon Foundation Chair of the Humanities, Dartmouth College
Conference Website: (http://americanstudies.binghamton.edu)
Shifting Tides, Anxious Borders is an interdisciplinary graduate student conference dedicated to exploring the changing contours of the field of American Studies. This year's conference focuses on "American Empire in the Age of Globalization" in an effort to foreground new movements in transnational and hemispheric American Studies. As such, we encourage paper proposals that explore the intersections between US histories of imperialism and colonialism and contemporary forces of globalization and neoliberal capitalism from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives.
Many Transnational Americanist scholars initially viewed globalization as an interpretive framework that could re-configure the object of study in the field of American Studies, shifting focus away from the nationalist paradigm of the Cold War in order to highlight America's embeddedness within transnational and transcultural forces.
This year's conference asks scholars in the field of American Studies to engage a series of critical tensions that lie at the heart of this movement. How have the social stratifications ushered in by the age of globalization mirrored, refracted, and/or contested the types of social stratifications produced by US practices of Empire? How have core tenets of the discourse of US exceptionalism saturated cultural and economic processes of globalization? What types of possibilities does a transnational approach to American Studies open up, and what are the limits of such an approach? We invite submissions that engage questions and critiques of American empire across a wide range of historical time periods in an effort to re-think our current global occasion and imagine new futures for the field of American studies.
Possible Topics may include, but are not limited to:
Borderland studies, crossing borders
Exile, Migration, Expatriation and the "Exilic"
Native American Studies and the question of the "postcolonial"
Heterotopia / reservations / the commons
Critiques of the American "Melting Pot" thesis
Rethinking the frontier myth for the 21st century
Connections/distinctions between The "American" south / The "global south"
The End of American Empire?
Marxist approaches to Globalization Studies
Global Capital, Crisis, and the "End of History" thesis
Global and National Responses to Environmental Destruction
Ecocriticism and New Americanist Studies
The Erotics of American Empire
Sovereignty (and Globalization)
States of Exception, Emergency, Crisis
Global Feminism / Decolonial Feminism
Masculinities of Empire
Transnational Religious Identities
The Military Industrial Complex
Empire and Sexual Exploitation
Globalized Racial Formations
Humanitarianism and Its Discontents
Discourses of Human Rights
Geneva Conventions / International Courts
Terrorism after 9/11 and Obama's War in Afghanistan
Please Send 250-500 Word Abstracts to: Tom Jordan at email@example.com
Abstracts Due: March 19, 2010