Shifting Tides, Anxious Borders 2014 Graduate Conference in Transnational American Studies at Binghamton University

“Transatlantic Modernities”

Saturday, April 26 2014

Keynote: Anthony Bogues, Lyn Crost Professor of Social Sciences & Critical Theory and the Director of the Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice, Brown University

Deadline for Proposal Submission: March 7, 2014.

“Shifting Tides, Anxious Borders” is an interdisciplinary graduate conference dedicated to exploring the changing contours of the field of American Studies. This year’s conference theme, “Transatlantic Modernities,” focuses on the literary and material facets of cultural exchange across the Atlantic during historical moments broadly defined as modern. We aim to situate the study of “American” cultural production in the geographical nexus formed by the Americas (including the Caribbean), Africa, and Europe, with an emphasis on points of contact, methods of exchange, and acts of border crossing. We are interested in how transatlantic flows of capital and peoples continue to influence and redefine the production and study of culture from the rise of industrialism, imperialism, capitalism, and the nation-state in the age of modernity through to the globalized, postcolonial, and post-national era.

In keeping with our conference’s focus, we seek papers focused on the historical and cultural relationships between peoples and nations within the transatlantic nexus. How are traditional conceptions of modernity altered when viewed from the perspectives of Caribbean, Latin American, South American, West African, and Native American communities? How does one define modernity in the face of the decline of the nation-state in the postcolonial, late-capitalist, global era? How do the economic and geopolitical realities of this era shape and reconstitute the indissoluble continuum of experience ranging from the local to the national to the transatlantic to the global? What would a transatlantic American Studies look like in theory and in practice? We invite panel and paper submissions that follow these and similar lines of inquiry.

This year, we are planning to have faculty from across New York acting as respondents to each panel, rather than having the traditional moderator.  Each paper will be read prior to the conference, and the respondents will provide feedback, offer questions, and direct the conversation after the panel has presented. Because of this, we ask for completed papers two weeks prior to the conference.

To submit a paper or panel proposal, send a 250-word abstract to shiftingborders@gmail.com. Panel proposals should include the names and e-mail addresses of three participants, with individual paper abstracts and a 150-word abstract uniting them. Possible Topics include, but are not limited to:

●      Transatlantic Exchanges of Culture, Goods, and Peoples

●      The Transatlantic Political Subject

●      Transatlantic Geographies and Regionalism

●      Literature and Art and the Politics of the Transatlantic

●      Critical Race Theory in the Americas

●      Representing and Re-Presenting the Triangular Trade

●      Ex-Patriotism and Literary Culture

●      The United States and Producing/Enforcing the Modern

●      Indigenous Culture and the Arrival of the “Modern”

●      Transatlantic Practice and Pedagogy

●      The Intersections of Modern Temporality and the Constructions of Space

●      Modernity, Progress, and the Politics of Development

●      The World Wars and Constructions of the Global

●      Transatlantic Cosmopolitanism and the Urban/Rural Divide

●      The Histories of Transatlantic Diaspora

●      Transatlantic Migrations and the Politics of Labor