Call For Papers: Texas Tech Comparative Literature Symposium

The 2010 Texas Tech University Comparative Literature Symposium on "American Studies as Transnational Practice"

April 9-10, 2010 at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, U. S. A.

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: 

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 South Korean-U.S. Relations”
Scott Townsend, U.S. visual artist in Raleigh, North Carolina, “Interactive Installation and Film on ‘Border Relations’”
Qingsong Wang, Chinese photographer based in Shanghai, “Photography and the Consumerist Invasion of China”

Proposal Submission Deadline: January 18, 2010

American Studies as transnational practice not only raises questions on the changing roles that the United States has played as a great power in the global arena since the late nineteenth century, but also calls attention to its own disciplinary premises, interests, and imaginaries in relation to area studies and comparative literature. As American Studies has recently intervened in U.S. exceptionalism and neoliberal capitalism in its critique of discourses that vary from “manifest destiny” to “market democracy,” it also foregrounds its own formation as a product of the Cold War and its renewed influence in the post-socialist regimes in China, Russia, and East Europe. Meanwhile, with new paradigm shifts in transnational and global studies that encompass transoceanic, hemispheric, and planetary consciousness, how does American Studies negotiate and reconfigure its own field imaginaries and boundaries? If Hemispheric Studies highlights the issue of “the Americas,” how would its critical disposition “provincialize” American Studies? If the westward movement was central to U.S. nation-building and the national imaginary, how do the generations of Mexican presence in the Southwest as well as more recent northward migrations of Latinos/as impact the U.S. consciousness as simultaneously old and new national narratives? If Trans-Atlantic movements have informed and reshaped U.S. literary, cultural, and historical experiences, then what new possibilities would Trans-Pacific movements pose for American Studies in the twenty-first century? What are the new opportunities and challenges if we reconsider U.S. literature, history, and culture in planetary terms?
This symposium invites presentations that investigate the theory and praxis involving American Studies in transnational contexts at various historical junctures, and seeks projects that explore specific cases in U.S. history, literature, and culture with global dimensions and implications. We welcome proposals that examine American Studies from U.S. regional locales and global sites as well as abstracts that reconsider U.S. historical and cultural experiences in transnational and planetary frameworks.
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 Asians 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
-- The Role of Spanish in American Studies
-- Transnational Cinema
Please send your one-page proposal and one-page C.V. by January 18, 2010