CFP: American Studies as Transnational Practice (4/9-4/10/10)
April 9-10, 2010 at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, the United States of America
Texas Tech University houses the internationally known Southwest Collections and the Vietnam Archives. Spring in Lubbock is mild and sunny.
Keynote Speakers:
Eva Cherniavsky, Department of English, University of Washington
Colleen Lye, Department of English, University of California at Berkeley
Walter Mignolo, Department of Literature, Duke University
Donald Pease, Department of English, Dartmouth College
Art Exhibition:
Wang Qingsong, photographer based in Shanghai, “Photography and the Consumerist Invasion
of China”
Margarita Cabrera, Mexican artist living in El Paso, “US Immigration Policy and Maquiladora
Practices"
Joomi Chung, Korean artist resident in Miami, Ohio, “Installation Art about Korean-U.S.
Relations”
Scott Townsend, American visual artist in Raleigh, North Carolina, “Interactive Installation and
Film on 'Border relations'”
Proposal Submission Deadline: January 18, 2010
With the rise and fall of U.S. political and economic powers around the globe in recent decades, American Studies as transnational practice has demonstrated new critical vigor and intellectual dynamics. Not only has American Studies self-reflexively reexamined its own premises such as U.S. exceptionalism and developed new critical paradigms that reconsider U.S. cultural production in terms of planetary consciousness, but it has also redefined its disciplinarity in relation to Area Studies and Comparative Literature. From Trans-Atlantic to Trans-Pacific Studies, from Hemispheric to Global South Studies, American Studies has integrated and engaged recent paradigm shifts in transnational studies as well as negotiated and reconfigured its own field imaginary and boundary.
This symposium looks for presentations that investigate American Studies as a discipline at both theoretical and practical levels and papers that focus on specific cases of U.S. historical, literary, and cultural production. We encourage proposals that examine American Studies from U.S. regional and global sites and projects that reconsider U.S. cultural production from new transnational frameworks.
Possible topics may include but are not restricted to the following:
-- Rethinking the boundaries among American Studies, Area Studies, and Comparative
Literature
-- Empire, Race, and Trans-Atlantic Studies
-- Race, Gender, and Class in Transnational American Studies
-- The local and the global in Trans-Pacific Studies
-- Borderland, natural environment, and planetary consciousness
-- Border crossing and critical cosmopolitanism
-- Border literature, Chicano/a theory, and Hemispheric Studies
-- American Studies and Post-socialism in China, Russia, and Eastern European countries
-- The Trans-Pacific movement of Chinese in diaspora
-- Wall Street and the future of “market democracy”
-- Westward movement and U.S. southwestern literature
-- Colonialism and neocolonialism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America
-- Global and local wars: displacement, migration, and expulsion
-- The Vietnam War and Vietnamese in diaspora
-- Transnational feminist and queer studies
-- Postcolonial studies and beyond
-- Transnational Cinema
Please send your one-page proposal and one-page C.V. by January 18, 2010:
Dr. Yuan Shu
Department of English
P.O. Box 43091
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, TX 79409-3091
You may email your inquiry, proposal, and C.V. to Dr. Yuan Shu at (yuan.shu@ttu.edu). The symposium information will be available on our website: http://english.ttu.edu/complit/.
