Backlash
EAAS 2028 Paris (site TBD)
29 May 2028 – 2 June 2028
In his 1980 book addressed to Christian Americans and entitled Listen America!, pastor Jerry Falwell defended the idea that “Americans want[ed] to see this country come back to basics, back to values, back to biblical morality, back to sensibility, and back to patriotism.” (Falwell, 1980, p. 19). After several decades of social movement activism, a certain America engaged in rolling back to a certain extent what had been accomplished in the field of socioeconomic, gender, and racial inequalities. This 1980s conservative reaction was famously examined by journalist Susan Faludi in her 1991 best-selling book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Womean, in which she focuses on the powerful antifeminist and anti-women wave that surged in the 1980s-1990s. Different scholars have explored the intersecting dynamics of power that stem from the concept. In the late 1970s, social scientists Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Rabb offered the following definition, “Backlash politics may be defined as the reaction by groups which are declining in a felt sense of importance, influence and power, as a result of secular endemic change in the society, to seek to reverse or stem the direction of change through political means” (1978, p. 29). More recently, political scientists Jane Mansbridge and Shauna Shames have further nuanced the term, “When a loss (usually with outrage over the loss) leads individuals or groups to use coercive power to regain a level of former power as capacity, this is a backlash” (2008). Such work demonstrates the multiplicity of the ways in which backlash can be mobilized as a tool of analysis. EAAS 2028 thus seeks to explore the various ways in which backlash can be understood across theoretical fields, historical time periods, and redefined in contemporary research.
In literary studies, the question of backlash may concern the relationship between developments occurring within the field and their reception in the United States and abroad, as well as the ways in which they become weaponized in the context of ideological and political debates that may have very little to do with matters of literary form. On one level, the issue is aesthetic and pertains to the various modes of literary expression; on another level, it is also tied to effects of interpretation and reading, or even to the formation of canons and counter-canons to which positive or negative values are assigned amid controversies or full-fledged culture wars in which the texts themselves sometimes play little more than an incidental role. It may therefore prove useful to conduct a meta-critical analysis of the way “American” “literature,” or whatever is thus designated, serves as a laboratory in which notions are developed whose true significance only becomes apparent elsewhere, in contexts sometimes far removed from those in which they originated. Attention will be given to the way writing, in many cases, proves able to blur boundaries and destabilize ready-made categories: thus, it resists the binarity underlying the very concept of “backlash,” a term that denotes a conflict between forces that operate in opposite directions. Scholars are thus invited to examine the semantic variations of “backlash” in the literary field, and consider whether this concept necessarily denotes regression, a retrograde movement, a return to prejudice and abuse, a desire to return to the past and restore the former order, a reaction against the forces of progress, or whether there are affinities between revolution and references to past forms or styles, as in the case of Modernism, for example, or even in the reappearance of classical and traditional narratives within contemporary experimental avant-garde movements.
In the arts, understood broadly as phenomena of reply, response, resistance, or counterattack, backlash can be overt or subtle, institutional or aesthetic, reactionary or strategic. It may seek to restore imagined pasts, defend hegemonic norms, or reassert cultural hierarchies under threat. How do cultural and artistic productions in film, television, music, and the visual arts stage and contest backlash? How have cultural texts both articulated and anticipated reactionary movements? In what ways do they participate in the resistance to social transformations related to race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, migration, and environmental politics? Conversely, how have artists and cultural producers mobilized backlash as a productive or even emancipatory force?
In the social sciences, backlash is often understood as a historical cycle in which moments of reform are met with intense resistance to change. Historians of race have, for instance, examined how Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court decision that made school segregation unconstitutional, led to multiple forms of racial violence (Klarman, 1994) and professional discrimination (Fenwick, 2022). Other scholars have explored the scope and types of resistance to minority groups’ efforts to gain rights over the centuries, and questioned how feminist groups, LGBTQIA+ collectives, or immigrant communities had and could counter backlash (Faludi, 1991; Piscopo and Walsh, 2020; Patashnik, 2023). American history is also replete with episodes of strong political tensions over changes in educational approaches, religious practices, foreign policies, and land use. As President Woodrow Wilson suggested in his 1913 speech, “What is progress?,” the question has often been raised “whether thought in this country is tending to do anything by which we shall retrace our steps, or by which we shall change the whole direction of our development?” Over the years, faced with the prospect of social, political, religious, institutional, and territorial evolution, sometimes out of fear and/or nostalgic longing, American men and women have exercised both individually and collectively various forms of coercive power.
EAAS 2028 intends to mobilize the concept of “backlash” to discuss phenomena of reaction, counteraction, reply, response, retaliation, resistance or counterattacks in specific historical, political, artistic, cultural, literary, intellectual, economic and/or social contexts in the United States from colonial times until today, and possibly their interactions with North America and the world. While the term originally described “a powerful counterassault on women’s rights” in the 1980s, it can be used to describe ideological tensions between modernity and traditions, progressive and conservative forces, the powerful and the powerless, or the majority and the minority, among other examples. The aim of this conference is also to rethink the concept around tensions between systemic and contextual issues and potentially explore new theoretical venues.
The papers could focus on case studies looking at specific strategies, tactics and variations at different times and places; or could use an epistemological lens to explore how the social sciences and humanities have mobilized the concept.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- The use of backlash in different disciplines and studies
- Backlash as a transnational or global phenomenon
- Historiography/literature, rewriting myths of the past and nostalgia
- Literary and visual cultural productions and politics (for example, abolitionist novels and nativist backlash)
- The literary canon and counter-canon
- Resistance to Native American and indigenous rights and claims
- Reactions to environmentalism and climate change
- The role of popular culture and/or the media in circulating reactionary messages
- The epistemic role of emotions in politics; identity and grievance politics
- Conservatism, populism, authoritarianism
- Controversies around cultural or artistic events
- Moral panics and culture wars
- Censorship, cancelling, book-banning
- The impact of backlash on different minority groups
- Antifeminism and masculinism
- The LGBTQIA+ movement and responses to it
- Counter-hegemonic pushback
Conference Format
EAAS 2028 will be held in-person.
Submission and Selection Process
EAAS 2028 welcomes proposals for both individual papers and complete panels. Individual paper proposals and panel proposals will be submitted directly to the conference scientific committee and evaluated as part of the same selection process. Accepted individual papers will subsequently be grouped into coherent panels by the scientific committee. Panel proposals should include three to four presenters and a chair. The chair can be a speaker on the panel.
Scholars are warmly encouraged to develop complete panels in advance of the submission deadline.
To help make connections among scholars possible, individuals may circulate brief panel ideas, expressions of interest, or invitations for potential co-panelists through the EAAS mailing list, the News section of the EAAS website, and the following exchange platform [##name/link##].
We especially welcome panels that bring together participants who might not otherwise already be working together and that reflect the international, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary character of EAAS.
Deadline for open panels: March 15-June 7/8, 2027
Announcement of selected panels: first week of July 2027
Deadline for individual papers to panels: October 15, 2027
The deadline for individual paper and complete panel proposals is October 15, 2027. Applicants will be informed of the outcome of the selection process by late December 2027.
Panel proposals should include:
- 350-word overview of the panel theme
- 350-word abstracts for each paper
- 150-word author biographies
Individual proposals must include:
- 350-word abstracts for each paper
- 150-word author biographies
In addition, EAAS 2028 will include a poster exhibition presenting thematic explorations in a different format, also proofed and selected. Posters will be on display online (conference website) and in one of the conferences venues. Poster proposals must include:
- 350-word poster rational
- Graphic Pre-view (Format: pdf)
- 150-word author(s) biography/biographies
Important Dates
- Individual and panel submission deadline October 15, 2027
- Notification of Acceptance/Rejection: December 20, 2027
- Registration deadline for speakers: X
- Conference Dates: May 29 – June 2, 2028