Shifting Tides, Anxious Borders: A Graduate Student Conference in Transnational American Studies. Deadline: March 2, 2012

Binghamton University is hosting a graduate student conference in transnational American Studies on April 20-21, 2012. The conference is titled "Shifting Tides, Anxious Borders: A Graduate Student Conference in Transnational American Studies," and the keynote speakers include Donald Pease, Dartmouth College and Daniel T. O’Hara, Temple University. William V. Spanos, Binghamton University, will present the closing address.

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 “Re-Imagining the New World(s),” an interrogation of the role of a variety of empires, most specifically the American and British empires, in the construction of culture, expression, and subjectivity. This conference will focus on the comparison of the imaginaries produced by empire(s), with a focus on cultural empire. It seeks to examine individual world empires, and to question how each individual power maintained, or maintains, itself when in conflict with its own marked Others and competing empires. These histories speak not only to past interactions of empires, but may also add to our understandings of current events such as Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring.

This conference will focus on the intersection of historical representation and political imagination, the question of re-historicization, and modes of looking beyond the simplistic dichotomies of “new world vs. old world” imaginings. Such a focus emerges out of the transnational basis of the conference, where the slippages between perspectives allow for a reading of cultural objects as they exist in conversation and competition with other empires. This conference seeks to examine the multiplicity of globalized empire. What are the founding discursive tropes of the new world, and how are they established or discarded in the contemporary globalized moment? What are the rhetorical modes of discourse that are used to justify imperial cultural practices? How does empire represent itself and its Others across different areas of history? How is difference and subjectivity activated or deactivated by empire? What are the contemporary visions of the new world that may be used to re-imagine the direction of modern globalization? We invite submissions that engage these questions and critique the role of 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: Narratives of Travel and Ages of Exploration; Mapping New Worlds (Cartography, “Worlding,” etc.); Contextualizing Discovery (Scientific, Geographical); Rhetorics of the “New World”; Producing New World Cultural Economies; Gender in the New World (Contemporary or Historical); Historicizing Conquest; Historical Border Politics or History as a Border; Reconsidering Literary Historiography; Postcolonial Nationalisms; Reinventing Traditions of Exceptionalism; Subaltern Subjects of Empire; Reevaluating National Economies in a Globalized Context; The Emerging Public/Private Divide; Immigration or Citizenship Studies; Producing the Radical Imagination; Exploring Evolving State Fantasies; Global Capital & The End of History; Transnational Human Rights; The Multiplicity of Zionism; Arab Spring & New World Imaginings

Submissions: Send 300-word abstracts to Shawn Jasinski at shiftingborders@gmail.com.
Deadline: March 2nd, 2012
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