Call for Papers: "Nation Matters: America's Shifting Terrains"
[Abstract deadline: 2/2/03; Conference dates: 4/30 - 5/2/03]
The American Studies Colloquium at the University of Washington is seeking
abstracts for its 11th annual graduate student conference, "Nation Matters:
America's Shifting Terrains." In response to the global shift of the new
American Studies, this conference will consider the extent to which the
"nation matters" to the study of American cultural forms and historiography
from a variety of critical approaches. We are interested in individual
papers or panel presentations which address the place of the nation as the
ultimate rubric within disciplinary organizations of knowledge, especially
in reaction to the field's increasingly postnational(ist) and transnational
tendencies. We see these questions as largely a matter of critical scale
and we are very interested in work which functions in and across a
multiplicity of geographical, economical and hermeneutical scales in its
treatment of culture, politics and history.
The keynote speaker of this year's conference is John Carlos Rowe (English,
UC Irvine), whose recent work on Post-Nationalist American Studies (U of
California P, 2000) and The New American Studies (U of Minnesota P, 2002)
has been concerned with assessing the recent transnational or
postnational(ist) shift in American Studies scholarship, which asks us to
reconsider the categories which have shaped and informed the field up to
this point. This year's conference takes these new critical discourses as
its starting point.
Participants might consider the following broadly articulated questions:
Does the nation matter to the production of knowledge in the humanities and
social sciences? What are the political implications and stakes involved in
questioning the position of the nation within knowledge production? To what
extent do national biases inform emerging transnational and global
methodologies?
Topics/Fields may include but are not limited to:
National territoriality, spatialization and landscape
National and transnational social movements
Race, class, gender and sexuality in national and transnational contexts
Cosmopolitanism and citizenship
Imperialism and postcolonialist critique
Pragmatism and nationalism
History of American Studies, Ethnic Studies and Literary Studies
Transnational approaches to cultural politics and theory
Ethnography and travel writing
Cultural and political geography
Pedagogy, institutional practices, and the teaching of the nation
Theories of the state-form and nationhood
Language communities and the nation
Memory, trauma and collective identity
Nationalist and post-nationalist multiculturalisms
Expatriation, diaspora, migration
Nation and affect
Science, technology and the (re)production of the nation
Please send (via email or regular mail) a one-page abstract for a 15 minute
paper by February 2, 2003 to:
Ji-Young Um
Box 354330
Department of English
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195-4330
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or write Erika Lin: elin@english.upenn.edu
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