CFP for a Special Forum of The Journal of Transnational American Studies "Transnational American Studies within the Post-Arab Spring Context " Guest Editor: Eid Mohamed, PhD

CFP for a Special JTAS Forum: Transnational American Studies within the Post-Arab Spring Context

Guest Editors: Eid Mohamed, PhD

The field of American Studies has problematized concepts such as nation and identity, and shown the underlying conditions giving rise to, as well as the damaging effects of American exceptionalism. This Special Forum is envisioned to be aligned with the impact of transnationalism on American studies, as demonstrated through its planned emphasis on multidirectional processes of cultural exchange and transfer. It aims to take American studies beyond its traditional geographical and disciplinary limits, in ways that highlight the critical power of non-American-based paradigms of knowledge. It forwards the call for both new critical vocabularies and scholarship that foregrounds subaltern voices from the global South as the actors and agents of globalized modernity.

This Special Forum is intended to rethink the field of American Studies within the context of current global events– variable, rather than exceptional. It aims to consider what we might gain from global analysis, beginning from spaces of rebellion, exposed by the Arab Spring and sites like Tahrir Square, Zuccotti Park, Dakota Access Pipeline protests in the US, and the 2012 Quebec student protests in Canada. Contributions are welcome by scholars from around the globe who work in American Studies or closely related fields to assay a truly global ambit of analysis, beyond the transnational turn to not only acknowledge the interconnectedness of global developments in political economy but also provide the means to extend and deepen critiques of the myth of American exceptionalism.

We are interested in scholarly works that examine themes related but not limited to the following:

• What it is to do “American” Studies in a global context, while remaining attuned to interdisciplinary study as shaped by local contexts.
• The post-Arab Spring dynamics and its impact on American Studies as a field of study and its teaching outside the US.
• The racialization of Islam within a continuum of imperialism and fight for civil rights and liberation.
• The heterogeneity of dissenters mobilized by internationalized “threat” and claims to space.
• How cultural texts like film, new media, fiction, or comics transform the public sphere and imagine community to enable or inhibit social change.
• How Arabs, Americans, African Americans and other groups construct national and transnational identities in light of local, regional, and global bio- and geo-politics.

Submission Guidelines

Please submit manuscripts electronically through this website. Submissions should be received by November 15^th, 2018.

Manuscripts should range between 6,000-8,000 words, including notes and works cited, must follow the Chicago Manual of Style, and include an abstract (not to exceed 250 words). Submission should follow the Submissions guidelines for JTAS.