CFP: Nation Matters: America's Shifting Terrains (grad) (2/2/03; 4/30/03-5/2/03)

From: Ji-Young Um (umji@u.washington.edu)
Date: Thu Jan 09 2003 - 03:29:28 EST


Call for Papers: "Nation Matters: America's Shifting Terrains"
University of Washington, Seattle, USA

[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
umji@u.washington.edu
Box 354330
Department of English
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195-4330

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