CFP: Understanding America in the 21^st Century: Culture and Politics

Convened by the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association

Salzburg Global Seminar, Schloss Leopoldskron, Salzburg, Austria

Friday, September 21 – Tuesday, September 25, 2018

Overview

Ever since Salzburg Global Seminar was founded in 1947 as the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, critical dialogue about American history, literature, cultural institutions, politics, economics and law has played a vital role in our organization’s development and legacy.

The annual symposia convened by the Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association focus on topical questions and issues related to American culture and society, in order to foster understanding of how these issues are influenced by, and affect, the world as a whole.

The multi-disciplinary symposium in 2018 will explore the sensitive intersect of culture and politics in America’s rapidly changing landscape, building on the conclusions of the 2017 symposium on Life and Justice in America: Implications of the New Administration.

Our ultimate purpose is to foster greater understanding of how the lives of individuals and communities in 21st century America are being reshaped as a result of current social, political and cultural forces as well as America’s changing role in world affairs.

Participants will examine factors related to leadership, gender, race and ethnicity changes in America, transformations in media and digital communication, the decline of trust in political and cultural institutions, the direction and polarizing significance of popular culture and the arts in understanding America, and the implications of the above for the future of American Studies abroad.

Program Format The four-day session will be a highly participatory and outcome-oriented program, held at Schloss Leopoldskron, the historic home of Salzburg Global Seminar. Daily thematic presentations by distinguished speakers will be followed by moderated plenary discussions, as well as panels and café discussion groups on topical issues to maximize cross-sector interaction with participants.  Afternoon sessions will include small thematic working groups, providing multiple opportunities for all participants to share their knowledge and expertise on equal terms and to build new alliances and research projects.

Participants will analyze the likely directions of changes  in America over the next decade, drawing on their observation of developments since the 2016 election as well as political trends leading up to the mid-term elections of 2018.

Participant Profile Salzburg Seminar American Studies Association (SSASA) symposia are intended to connect scholars and professional leaders from around the world to build collaborative networks for research and critical debate. The 2018 meeting – the 16th SSASA symposium – will bring together approximately 40 participants from more than 25 countries. In addition to public and private sector professionals, participants will include academics teaching about the United States in universities across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Central, Eastern and Western Europe, as well as the United States. We will actively encourage participation by Americanists, political scientists and cultural professionals interested in the future direction of American culture.

Key Questions  Issues to be addressed during the symposium will include:

1. Why is America so hard to understand?
2. In what way are increased social, political and cultural tensions a product of demographic shifts, changes in leadership, or issues of gender, race relations, the politization of immigration, and crime and punishment and judicial fairness in the U.S.?
3. What explains the loss of trust that America is currently experiencing and what are the implications for the future?
4. What are the most dynamic factors, specifically including the distribution of wealth and educational opportunity, that are contributing to the polarizing of society and politics?
5. To what degree does an analysis of popular culture and cultural institutions, such as political, economic, educational, and the arts foster an understanding of America?
6. To what extent does American populism and nationalism differ from that presently being experienced elsewhere?
7. In what way and manner has the expectation and conduct of political leadership changed in the 21st century?

Program Goals

• The session’s primary goal is to foster intellectual analysis and discussion between professionals and academics about the factors shaping the future of personal life and communities in America.
• Participants will gain a better understanding of the complexity of domestic and international forces impacting and driving America in the 21st century, to enrich their teaching, research and practice.

Session Chairs:

Christopher Bigsby, Director, The Arthur Miller Institute, University of East Anglia, UK

Ronald Clifton, Retired Counselor, Senior Foreign Service of the United States; Associate Vice President (ret.), Stetson University

SPEAKERS will include:

Christopher Bigsby, Director, The Arthur Miller Institute, University of East Anglia, UK

Reinhard Heinisch (invited), Professor and Chair, Department of Political Science, University of Salzburg

Tricia Rose, Chancellor’s Professor of Africana Studies and Director of the Center for Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Brown University.

Charlie Savage (invited), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Washington correspondent to the New York Times

For more information about the program, contact Symposium Director Ms. Marty Gecekmgecek@SalzburgGlobal.org

The symposium website and a registration form can be accessed at

www.SalzburgGlobal.org/go/ssasa16

Information on designated speakers will be posted there as soon as they are confirmed.

Limited financial aid is available towards the symposium fee of 740 Euro (which includes all expenses in Salzburg, but not travel). One full scholarship will be awarded through the Emory Elliott Scholarship fund, and one through the Clifton Scholarship Fund.

CFP: “Other Souths on Page and Screen”

Polish Journal for American Studies (PJAS) Special Issue

In the 1993 inaugural issue of Southern Cultures Harry Watson and John Shelton Reed claimed in “The Front Porch” that “although it may be said that there is one South, there are also many Souths, and many cultural traditions among them … There is one South spawned by its many cultures” (1993). The American South has never been a homogenous concept. Yet, up until the late nineteenth century Southern writers tried to evoke an image of their region based on “slavery, mocking birds, hominy grits and Bourbon whisky” (Lawson, Following Percy 47). By eliminating any experience (e.g. of poor whites or African Americans) which contradicted their own, white Southern writers tried to create a monolithic image of the patriarchal South. Such a partial projected image was of course reductive in nature, as the South has always been a union of opposites – such as “calm grace and raw hatred, polished manners and violence, individualism and conformism” (Holman, The Roots 1). Indeed, such opposites inspired various twentieth-century writers to reflect on differing dimensions of the region. Writers such as Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers and Barry Hannah employed alternative modes of representation (Southern gothic, grotesque, irony, black humor, to name a few). Harry Crews and Dorothy Allison visualized the poor white existence in Southern letters. Racial struggles and the issue of passing were memorably depicted by Charles Chesnutt. Tennessee Williams’, Reynolds Price’, and Charles Nelson’s texts show how the South perceived and dealt with masculinity and homosexuality. Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full depicted immigrants as the Other. The younger generation of Southern writers, such as Larry Brown, Charles Frazier, Dori Sanders, Josephine Humphreys, Kaye Gibbons, demonstrate that “today’s southern writers are not homogenized mainstreamers and are certainly not immune to the great changes in their region” (Gretlund, Heads on Fire). Writers seek the Caribbean connection through re-positioning the South in the global discourse. The Asian diaspora in the South becomes more visible and vocal. The Southern landscape has also lured television producers and viewers (True Blood, Treme, American Horror Story, and True Detective).

THE OBJECTIVE OF THE THEMED ISSUE:

The proposed themed issue of Polish Journal for American Studies does not seek a holistic image of the South, because “[e]ach of these monistic concepts is true within its own limits, and each is false as a picture of the entire region. For each of these concepts has been an attempt to bind together a heterogeneous land and a varied people through the application of a Procrustean model made of monistic and simplistic – although often highly sophisticated – generalizations” (Holman, The Roots 97). Keeping in mind the inexhaustibility and complexity of the South as a region, the special issue of Polish Journal for American Studies aims to reexamine and reassess the image of Other Souths presented in literature, cinematography and popular culture. Offering different renderings of the region, the contributions may include, but not necessarily be limited to, the following themes:

• the poor white South
• Appalachia and its cultural specificity
• Native Americans of the American South
• “interstitial” racial/ethnic identities (especially Asian and Hispanic)
• multiethnic identities
• immigration into the Dixie
• the Caribbean connection – the South resituated in the Global South (the American South as part of the larger plantation region of the Caribbean)
• the Southernness of Texas and Florida
• the South as the Northern projection versus Southern self-image
• (fading) masculinity, tomboys, and the Queer South
• silence / silencing – as mode of representation
• Southern gothic, grotesque, black humor

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE:

Authors are cordially invited to submit a 200 word abstract and short bio via email to urszula.niewiadomska.flis@gmail.com

The email should bear the subject line “(surname): abstract for PJAS.”

Abstract submission deadline: March 31, 2018

All abstracts will be subject to review. Authors will be notified by 15 May, 2018

Articles are due by August 31, 2018

Formal condition of acceptance:

Manuscripts of accepted articles should not have been published or be under consideration for publication elsewhere.

All papers undergo a review process, and the editors reserve the right to refuse papers or to make suggestions and/or modifications before publication.

Research articles should generally not exceed 8,000 words (inclusive of notes, references, and illustrations). Citations should follow MLA. In addition to endnotes, a list of works cited at the end of the article is requested.

Please address questions and submissions to the guest editor:

Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis urszula.niewiadomska.flis@gmail.com

More about Polish Journal for American Studies, its review procedure and past issues: http://www.paas.org.pl/pjas/

CFP: “Epochs re-echoing in European and American culture and literature”.

MINSK STATE LINGUISTICS UNIVERSITY, Belarusian Association for American Studies, Belarusian association of Teachers of English, IATEFL

CALL FOR PAPERS: May 14 – 16, 2018 (Minsk, MSLU)

XXVIIth ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

It is assumed that the conference will address the following problems:

• Romanticism – Modernism in the literature of the 19th–21^st centuries. Literary and cultural interaction.
• Modernism – Postmodernism in literature in the 20^th century– the beginning of the 21st century.
• Canon – Eclecticism in culture and literature in the 20th – the beginning of the 21st century.
• Europe – America: a View from the Other Continent
• Experiment in culture and literature in the 20th–21st centuries.

Conference languages: English, Belarusian, Russian.

It is expected that a volume of conference papers will be published. Only the papers presented at the conference will be considered for publication.

Applications for participation and a short summary of the paper (100 words) should be sent by April 15, 2018 to the following address:

MSLU World Literature Dept (conference 05.18),

Zakharova St., 21, Minsk, Belarus, 220034.

Tel.: (+375-17) 288-25-63 Fax: (+375-17) 294-75-04

E-mail: worldlit1@mail.ru

All the expenses connected with participation in the conference are to be covered by the participant or his/her institution.

Deadline for application: April 15, 2018 (worldlit1@mail.ru)

CFP: “Follow the Yellow Brick Road? Challenging Approaches to Progress in North America”.

*** Extended Deadline ***

• How have American women travelers approached the question of otherness?
• How has their travel experience contributed to reshaping their identities? How has it helped them negotiate gender expectations?
• What sort of travel books did they rely on when visiting foreign countries? What do these reveal about the formation of the American female traveler’s mind?
• How does American women’s travel experience complicate men’s official narratives of expansion, adventure, or colonization?
• Can we identify recurrent motifs, stylistic traits or concerns in their travel literature?
• What role has American women writers’ experience of mobility played in the construction of the nation?
• Can travelling be regarded more as an escape from confrontation with oneself or as a path to self-knowledge?
• In what ways can gendered and geographical borders interact? Can the transgression of geographical borders allow for more gender fluidity?
• What role did travelling play in the constitution of activist networks (abolition, woman’s suffrage)?
• To what extent did European travels allow African American women to break free from the genre of the slave narrative?
• Can we identify a transatlantic tradition of women’s writing that undermined the nation-building rhetoric of the U.S. as well as conventional constructions of race and citizenship?
• How did American women’s war writing in Europe contribute to destabilizing national assumptions?
• What vision of the self and of the world outside national borders has been conveyed by children’s and young adults’ literature featuring travel experiences since the 19^th century?
• How have these women appropriated the codes of typically male genres such as the colonial novel and the novel of adventure?

Proposals dealing with any of these themes and offering innovative and/or challenging perspectives on American women writers’ travel experiences will be most welcome. Authors should submit full-length essays and a short CV to Stéphanie Durrans (stephanie.durrans@u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr) by April 30, 2018. Papers should not exceed 45,000 signs, inclusive of footnotes and spaces, and authors should follow the formatting guidelines to be found online: http://transatlantica.revues.org/5220?lang=en. The editor will pre-select up to 9 proposals to make sure the issue reflects a broad variety of angles, methodologies and concerns. These essays will then be submitted to the approval of the editorial committee of Transatlanticaafter being peer-reviewed.

CFP: Association Française d’Etudes Américaines (AFEA) / French Association for American Studies
Graduate Student Symposium 2018 – University of Nice, May 22, 2018
Call for Presentations

The French Association for American Studies invites doctoral students in American studies to take part in the Graduate Symposium (“Doctoriales”) specifically organized on their behalf during its annual conference. This year’s workshops will be held on Tuesday, May 22, 2018 (9am-5pm) at the University of Nice (France). The conference will take place on May 23 to 25, 2018. For further information, please check our website: http://www.afea.fr

Since 2008, the AFEA has been encouraging the internationalization of its Graduate Student Symposium by offering grants (up to 500 euros each) for a maximum of ten European candidates (other than French) to help cover their travel expenses. All students are, in addition, invited to attend the whole conference free of registration charges. As part of its partnership with the AFEA, the United States Embassy provides funding for one doctoral student coming from an American university.

The symposium provides an opportunity for PhD students to present their research in a less formal setting than that of a full conference panel, and confront it to that of other European scholars. Doctoral students may be at an early or more advanced stage of their research. The proposals will be responded to by professors specializing in related fields. Candidates are invited to give their presentations in English within one of the two workshops offered: 1) American literature, or 2) American “civilization” (history, sociology, political science…). Proposals relevant to both fields (film studies, visual arts or music, for instance), or to another field (such as translation studies or linguistics) can be sent to either of the co-chairs.

Applications
Candidates must send a Curriculum Vitae and a 500-word abstract summarizing their dissertation proposal, plus an estimated budget of traveling expenses and funding otherwise available to them. They must mention when they began their PhD, and the name and affiliation of their advisor.

– Proposals in civilization studies must be sent electronically to both Professor Françoise Coste (coste.francoise@gmail.com) and Professor Romain Huret (Romain.Huret@ehess.fr).
– Proposals in literary studies must be sent electronically to both Professors Mathieu Duplay (mduplay@club-internet.fr) and Anne Ullmo (anneullmo1@gmail.com).

Deadline for application : February 15, 2018. The symposium organizers will respond to all applicants by March 15, 2018.

Professors Françoise Coste, Mathieu Duplay, Romain Huret, Anne Ullmo.