Annual Meeting: Call for Proposals
“Dimensions of Empire and Resistance: Past, Present, and Future,” November 15-18, 2012: Puerto Rico Convention Center (All Events) and the Caribe Hilton San Juan, Puerto Rico
The 2012 ASA Program Committee invites current individual members of the ASA (or an affiliated international American studies association) to submit proposals for individual papers, entire sessions, presentations, performances, films, roundtables, workshops, conversations, or alternative formats described below on any topic dealing with American cultures.
All proposal submitters must be current ASA members (or an affiliated international American studies association) at the time of submission. Each panel submission should also include a second current ASA member (in addition the panel organizer) at the time of submission.
Please note that if you had a user account for the 2011 submission site you will need to create a new account for the 2012 submission site.
All panelists, including chairs and commentators, must be current individual members of the ASA (or an affiliated international American studies association) in order to participate. All participants must buy *both* a membership and a registration in order to be properly registered for the conference. There is no log in required.
Membership includes subscriptions to American Quarterly, the Encyclopedia of American Studies Online, and the ASA Newsletter (quarterly publication). Membership also includes discounts on conference registration and hotel.
The submission site will open on December 1, 2011. Follow the submission instructions precisely and start the application process early. Emailed, faxed, scanned, or posted proposals will NOT be accepted. It is not possible to extend the submission deadline or accept late submissions for any reason. The submission site will automatically shut down at 11:59 PM (Pacific) on January 26, 2012.
Meeting Theme
Dimensions of Empire and Resistance: Past, Present, and Future
The Caribe Hilton Hotel, San Juan, Puerto Rico. The site of the 2012 conference calls on us to continue thinking deeply about the conceptual and methodological demands of a truly transnational American Studies. From Christopher Columbus’s second voyage in the late fifteenth century to the irony of an African American president’s state visit to Puerto Rico in the early twenty-first, the long history of this island and its peoples evokes many crucial themes regarding the transnational traffics generated by imperialism and anti-imperialism: indigeneity, conquest, and resistance; the administrative and juridical structures of empire; slavery and emancipation; migrations and diasporas; the mutually constitutive relationship between gender and sexuality on the one hand and imperial practice, subjugation, resistance, or citizenship on the other; the politics of inclusion and exclusion; militarism; local, national, and transnational feminisms; the footprints of corporate capitalism, from extraction to tourism; globalization and neoliberalism; the circuits of slavery and escape, political exile, and cultural production that link Puerto Rico with the larger Caribbean and the Americas; the travel and syncretism of circum-Atlantic arts and musics; the aesthetic traditions of a transnational imaginary; drug traffic; environmental degradation; appalling inequities and the endurance of genius and spirit. Equally important for a transnational American Studies is Puerto Rico’s unique relationship to the United States. From the perverse imperial logic of the Insular Cases, whereby the Supreme Court could define Puerto Rico as “foreign in a domestic sense” — that is, somehow “in” the United States but not “of” it — to Sonia Sotomayor’s ascendance to that very bench (amid dissenting characterizations of her as perhaps more “foreign” than “domestic”) a century later, the history of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans sheds a very particular light on the ongoing contradictions of the United States: the limits of U.S. citizenship, the displacements stimulated by neoliberal capitalism, the culture and politics of migration and diaspora. Finally, the simultaneously local and transnational specificities of Puerto Rican history and culture — from the Taino revival movement to the Young Lords and the Nuyorican Poets Café, from bomba and plena to Salsa and Reggaeton, from the island’s rich journalistic tradition to the alternative political movements of squatters, students, and anti-military activists — remind us that a transnational American studies must also be a truly interdisciplinary inquiry into how the material and symbolic are imbricated, how “culture” encompasses the imaginary and the everyday, how big political events and ideologies, are lived in intensely translocal ways.