CFP: Diasporic America: Dislocating the Nation (3/22/04; MLA '04)

From: Tim Marr (marr@email.unc.edu)
Date: Wed Mar 03 2004 - 23:53:16 EST


CFP: “Diasporic ‘America’: Dislocating the Nation”
2004 MLA Convention
Philadelphia 27-30 December

Papers are invited for the Interdisciplinary Approaches to Culture and
Society Discussion Group panel on “Diasporic ‘America’: Dislocating the
Nation” scheduled for the 2004 Modern Language Association convention in
Philadelphia.

Definitions of what is “American” have often been imagined to provide
cultural authority for the nation-state of the USA. This panel seeks to
dislocate this nationalizing formation by presenting alternative
insights into the cultural work of “Americanness.” How do the meanings
of “American” expressions, performances, productions, formations, or
artifacts become defamiliarized as they circulate in global situations
outside the jurisdiction of the United States? In what ways does the
varied constitutions of “Americanness” articulate different
possibilities—-ranging from the critical to the celebratory to the
colonial-—as they are diffracted beyond (or beneath) the boundaries of
the nation? The panel also welcomes papers that examine how
considerations of what is “American” are adapted or invented to perform
symbolic labor for indigenous groups, immigrant communities, and
counternational elements within the United States or within the greater
“Americas.”

Please send 250-word proposals and one-page CV to arrive by Monday,
March 22 to Timothy Marr, Curriculum in American Studies, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 27599 or to <marr@email.unc.edu>.

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