CFP: UT Austin American Studies Grad Conference
The Department of American Studies at the University of Texas is pleased to announce our biannual American Studies Graduate Student Conference: The World in American Studies Today to be held on March 30th and 31st, 2017, at the University of Texas at Austin. Following our fall celebration of the department’s 75th anniversary, which looked at the ways alumni have used American Studies in their worlds, we would like to use this opportunity to investigate the ways that nationalist and post-nationalist forces, both inside and outside the academy, have shaped the field.
From the rise of Trumpian disaffection to the protests of Colin Kaepernick, American nationalism has gained increasing purchase in our moment. From the vantage of the academy, it is all too easy to cast Trump and his followers as anomalies on an aspirationally liberal America, or worse yet, as inheritors of an uninterrupted white supremacy, which itself has deeply structured the whole of American culture. Each of these interpretations though, understands the rise of white nationalism or the alt-right as fundamentally separate from the rest of the world, and neither questions the ways in which our work as academics can and have been used as tools of nationalism, writing into existence an always already American culture. This is especially difficult in American Studies, where the very name of the field seems to reinforce a nationally bounded geographic space.
At this moment, it is important to ask, as Janice Radway did in her ASA Presidential Address, “What is American in American Studies? What is always already American?” How can we use American Studies to question our own complicity in perpetuating state and imperial power? How is American Studies as a discipline limited by its inherently nationalist focus? How do histories of colonization or extraction within the traditional bounds of the U.S. undermine traditional understandings of imperialism as without? Conversely, how can we as academics use our training to reach audiences outside of the academy, who are certainly also contemplating these same ideas.
We invite papers from all disciplines that analyze the ways peoples, groups, and communities have variously deployed or challenged ideas of nationalism. Potential lines of inquiry include:
- Resistances/celebrations of U.S. imperial power
- Domestic applications of state imperial power: internal colonies, resource extractions, the home or nuclear family as symbol and site of nationalist imaginings
- Counterpublics as a rejection of white liberalism
- Counterhegemonic claims to power, successes and failures thereof
- Marxist, anarchist, or libertarian political and economic reorganizations
- Nationalism in news media, reality TV
- Citizenship as an exclusionary category of identity
- Ability as a matrix of citizenship and national belonging
The keynote speaker, Dr. Anita Mannur, will focus on the positioning and presentation of South Asian and Arab American food. Dr. Anita Mannur is the Director of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Miami University (Ohio). Her major publications include Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture (Temple University Press, 2010), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. She also co-edited Eating Asian America: A Reader (NYU Press, 2013), with Martin Manalansan and Robert Ku, and Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader (Blackwell, 2003), with Jana Evans Braziel. Her current projects include a collection of essays and a book-length project. The former looks food in South Asian and Arab American contexts. In particular she examines the figure of the enemy nation in contrast to the notion of comfort food, the ways in which cuisines are considered unpalatable within a culture of militaristic imperialism, and the cultural spaces and narratives in which the figure of the enemy combatant is reimagined. The latter manuscript, tentatively titled, Toxic Food, examines how environmental disasters and public health epidemics in the post-WWII Asia Pacific region impact foodways to produce different forms of toxicity, which in turn are exacerbated by the conditions of corporate and state biopower.
Submission Guidelines:
Please send 250 word abstracts to utamsgradconference@gmail.com by January 15, 2017. Please put “UT AMS Grad Conference Submission" in the subject line. In addition to your abstract, please include a short bio with your submission.
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