Polish Association for American Studies Annual Conference

American Studies Center, University of Warsaw,

27-29 October 2016

Transnational American Studies:

Histories, Methodologies, Perspectives

Plenary speakers:

• Rob Kroes, Utrecht University, Netherlands
• James Kyung-Jin Lee, University of California, Irvine
• Agnieszka Soltysik-Monnet, University of Lausanne, Switzerland
• Marta Figlerowicz, Yale University

Debate on American Studies in Poland

• Ewa Łuczak, University of Warsaw;
• Tadeusz Rachwał,  University of Social Sciences and Humanities (SWPS);
• Marek Wilczyński, Gdańsk University

CALL FOR PAPERS

Can American studies benefit from expanding beyond its current intellectual framing by adopting a consciously transnational approach and a more determined interdisciplinary approach? What would such an evolution imply in various locations and cultural/intellectual/political contexts? How would it affect current hierarchies of knowledge production and distribution? Our aim is to provoke critical reflection on what it is we Americanists do and to expand the field of inquiry through methodological innovation.

Vernon Louis Parrington wrote in Main Currents in American Thought (1927) that he has “chosen to follow the broad path of our political, economic, and social development, rather than the narrower belletristic” – thereby he prospectively defined American studies as interdisciplinary. The field has since fared particularly well at the crossroads of literature and history, as evidenced in the work of the next generation of scholars, including the literary scholar F.O. Matthiessen and the historian Perry Miller, and in the myth and symbol school, whose founders include Henry Nash Smith and Leo Marx. Revisionary positions adopted by Lionel Trilling, Annette Kolodny and others critiquing American studies for neglecting minority perspectives and for reiterating the notion of American exceptionalism did not significantly alter this methodological frame. Feminism, ethnic and sexuality studies, and critical race theory have transformed the field’s hermeneutical perspectives since the 70s, while the end of the cold war helped crystallize a critique of American exceptionalism in the 90s and beyond. A recent development, perhaps even a paradigm change, is the influence of affect studies on explorations of American culture, as exemplified by the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Lauren Berlant.

All these developments notwithstanding, the field’s most rudimentary discursive procedures have retained many characteristics of a historicizing narrative and of literary readings. American studies is no longer devoted exclusively to literature and to political and social history, as emphasis has shifted to popular culture, including film, television and the new media. Yet, the field essentially remains a form of cultural studies, while social sciences, political science and economics, philosophy and art history are represented to a modest extent. This is especially clear in the construction of many American studies curricula and is reflected by institutional settings.

Linked to questions of methodology are recent calls for a transnational turn in American studies, theorized in recent decades by such scholars as (among others) Donald Pease, Amy Kaplan, Alice Kessler Harris, Rob Kroes, Heinz Ickstadt and Winfried Fluck. This approach means placing the US squarely in the global context rather than beginning with the premise of its special role. In fact, one of its main projects has been to challenge “the tenacious grasp of American exceptionalism,” as Kaplan put it.  Such calls appear to require a comparative perspective, including, though not limited to, the European. The approach may thus invite a discussion of American influences on European unification, or lead to placing the current immigrant crisis against the backdrop of American history, political system, and the way the US has integrated some of its constituent minorities. Conversely, the US is to be regarded not as unique but as occupying a determined place in the global economy and in the international system.

We are also keen to explore how writers, scholars, artists, filmmakers and others outside and within the United States have tackled received ideas about America, questioned its idealism and its founding mythology, or otherwise engaged with its self-image. Critical readings of America by outsiders represent a long-standing tradition that includes Alexis de Tocqueville and a multitude of others, Henryk Sienkiewicz and Bernard-Henri Lévy among them. Also worth considering are writings by American expatriates, such as Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Henry Miller and James Baldwin, and by Americans whose perspective was influenced by their travels abroad, such as Herman Melville and Mark Twain. Indigenous dissenters have offered and inspired a range of critical insights that may lend themselves to comparative readings and to being discussed from the perspective of a transnational American studies.

Conference organizers invite proposals for individual papers and panels exploring how Americanists in Poland and elsewhere understand their field and how they wish to change it and to challenge some of its entrenched premises.

Suggested topics and themes:

• transnationalization of American studies;
• examinations of the interdisciplinarity of American studies, or lack thereof, including the place of sociology and political science within the field.
• impact of recent theoretical perspectives: affect studies, object theory, posthumanism, etc.;
• historical perspectives on the evolution of American studies as a field
• key works and key theoretical controversies in the development of American studies;
• Americanization and globalization: cultural, economic and political perspectives;
• American studies and the discourses of anti-Americanism, US imperialism, and neoliberalism;
• critics of American exceptionalism and their impact on American studies;
• European enthusiasts and detractors of the USA; American expats looking back at the USA;
• the role of race, gender and class in American studies;
• intersectional perspectives in American studies;
• American studies and postcolonial studies;
• religion studies and American studies;
• comparative perspectives on American and European societies, politics and cultures;
• institutional and methodological aspects of American studies in specific locations;
• American studies and the crisis of the humanities;
• the role of political contexts in shaping American studies;
• American studies during and after the Cold War;
• American studies’ responses to 9/11;
• American studies and US diplomacy.

Please send paper abstracts (250 words) and panel proposals to:

paas2016warsaw@gmail.com by JUNE 10, 2016.

The conference will include a parallel session or sessions for PAAS members, including doctoral candidates, to present work in progress that may be unrelated to the conference topic.

Notification of acceptance will be sent by June 20, 2015.

Conference fee – PLN 500 (USD 130; EUR 115), PLN 450 for doctoral students

Deadline for registration and payment of the conference fee: September 9, 2016.

Conference venue: University of Warsaw main campus and American Studies Center.

Conference organizers:

Dr. habil. Agnieszka Graff                                 Dr. Karolina Krasuska

Dr. habil. Tomasz Basiuk                                  Ms. Ludmiła Janion

Department of American Literature, University of Łódź

September 29-30, 2016

Beginning with the modernist aesthetic revolution, poetry has continuously shown a stubborn resolve to respond to social, political and cultural shifts and crises with technical innovation. Such innovativeness speaks of the resilience of poetry, as genre, as it refuses to succumb to various announcements of its death or cultural irrelevance. The historical lineage of these responses is an impressive inventory of technical innovation in itself. While the New York School poets reacted to the monumental edifices of their modernist predecessors, their own performative-surrealist modes or varieties of “personism” were later replaced by the Language poets’ insistence on the dissolution of personal expressivity, while both the Language and New York School poets have been seen as responding to the technically moderate “scenic mode” of the 1970’s.

But these innovations have already had their continuations and further reverberations. As various prominent commentators suggest, poetry written in English, now also resounding beyond the Anglophone scope, has continued to respond to social and cultural crises and turmoils with technical innovation. Michael Davidson has argued that the “negative capability” of the contemporary poet, now resolving more around social crises than “personal uncertainty,” has given us poems of increased “interruption” and deliberate “illegibility,” as poets seek to make the genre responsive to the crises of global migrations, economic meltdown, ecological degradation, and fluctuations in our understanding of gender and labor. From a slightly different viewpoint, reinforcing Charles Bernstein’s advocacy of poetic artifice as resistance to dominant poetic “verse cultures,” Marjorie Perloff has defended the cause of technical poetic innovation and practicing poetry “by other means,” proposing an aesthetic platform which, while it calls for a rethinking of the notion of individual originality, also delivers a staunch defense of the capacity of poets and their practice to keep the genre afresh by technical and formal innovation.

These critics’ favoring of the poetry of citationality and cultural material appropriation has found support through various archival projects. One of them is the recently published 2014 Poetics Journal Digital Archive, preceded by a 2013 co-publication, A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982-1998. Edited by Lyn Hejinian and Barrett Watten, both volumes document critical developments, taking into account an impressively broad range of aesthetic perspectives. Meant as a resource for research, collaborations, and interventions, rather than a definitive collection of criticism, the archive offers an encouragement to view poetry and poetics as “an expanded field” of both theory and poetic practice. Poetic tradition does not take center stage in this project; instead, it privileges the realm of the avant-garde with its many theoretical and aesthetic debates. For the editors,

[p]oetics is a site for reflection on the making of the work that extends its construction into the fields of meaning in which it has its effects. Such fields of meaning are manifold, from the readers’ responses to historical contexts, social motivations, relations to other arts, and philosophical concerns, finally entailing something like a cunning of poetics: the manner in which the work of art extends its principle of construction, the way it makes meaning, through the contexts it draws from, finally, to transform them.

The challenge posed by this archival initiative may serve to sum up the thrust of what we are proposing to explore in this thematically focused conference. We invite scholars to present their views and stance on the technical innovation in the poetry written in English, as it continues to respond to crises of various kinds – social, economic, cultural, globalized – remaining a vitally flexible genre, able to shape insightful perspectives on the human situation.

The “new poetries” that we invite you to consider are the poetries of technical and aesthetic innovation. The conference presentations that we welcome and invite may include, but are in no way limited to, the following tendencies, contexts, and issues as well as the ways in which they have been intertwined:

•   language-centered poetics (including Language- and post-Language writing)
•  performance-based poetics
• the political character of the aesthetic
• (non-)originality/individuality/voice amidst technical innovation
• subject-construction in poetry
• ecopoetics
• New Narrative
• hybrid & cross-genre poetic modes
• conceptual and post-conceptual poetry
• poetic and poetic/artistic collaborations

Abstracts of paper proposals, up to 250-300 words, should be sent to conference organizers by May 15, 2016: dr Kacper Bartczak (kacper@uni.lodz.pl) and dr Małgorzata Myk (goskamyk@gmail.com).

The conference fee is 350 PLN.

The 1^st conference circular, contacting the authors of accepted proposals and containing further payment, venue, and accommodation information, will be sent by May 30.

The Profane West

Big Sky, Montana

September 21-24, 2016

The profane: not limited to the blasphemous or the obscene, but rather encompassing that which is underrepresented, undervalued, censored, denied, and/or secretly shared. Unofficial and unsanctioned pleasures and punishments. The necessary complement of the sacred, helping both to define and erode it.

The 51^st annual Western Literature Conference, hosted by Linda Karell (Montana State University), will take place in the spectacular natural beauty and undeniable tourist development that is Big Sky, Montana. We invite you to think about “the profane West” in ways that challenge entrenched definitions/conceptions/celebrations of the West—including the once subversive.

In addition to proposals on the conference theme and any aspects of literature about the North American West, we especially encourage innovative proposals on the following:

°  Indigenous literatures of and about the West
°  Feminist and queer approaches to Western literature
°  Women’s autobiographical and memoir writing
°  Pedagogy and K-12 issues in Western literature
°  Animals (and sacred cows) in Western literature
°  Montana literature and writers

Proposals for panels and roundtable discussions should include an abstract for each paper or presentation. Deadline: June 1, 2016.

Please direct your questions to WLAConference2016@westernlit.org.

For more information about the Western Literature Association visit their website here.

Nijmegen, the Netherlands, October 27-28

The intersection of contemporary debates about the future of American power and recent developments in the field of diplomatic history compel us to reconsider the foundations and contours of the American Century.
“Forging the American Century”, seeks to combine the current concern for America’s changing role in the world with new and developing insights into the nature of international relations to revisit the origins of the American Century: World War II and its aftermath. The conference is not about the high diplomacy of the war, nor is it necessarily about the start of the Cold War. Instead, it will address the ways in which the World War and America’s rise to global power drove Americans in different fields, both inside and outside the sphere of formal diplomacy, to forge new connections with the world. We will also address the many ways in which people around the world responded to the new or changing American presence.

By invoking the term “American Century”, we do not intend to link up to Henry Luce’s original arguments. With its confusing mix of jingoism, democratic idealisms, free market enthusiasm, nationalism, and naiveté, Luce’s “American Century” has rarely been taken seriously as a blueprint for American internationalism. However, the concept of an “American Century” has recently made a comeback in discussions about the United States’ relative decline. Can the United States maintain its international economic position in the face of Chinese competition? Have the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq caused irreparable damage to its role as an international leader? Will rising powers, especially the much-discussed BRICS countries, challenge the liberal world order that the United States has built and sustained?

In a recent anthology that he described as a “dissenter’s guide to the American Century”, Andrew Bacevich argues that:
“the conditions that once lent plausibility to visions of an American Century [have] ceased to exist…Contemporary reality no longer accommodate[s] the notion of a single nation arrogating to itself the role of a Good Samaritan, especially a nation with dirty hands…The utility of Luce’s formulation as a description of the contemporary international order or as a guide to future U.S. policy has been exhausted.”

Others have been more optimistic, both about the nature of the American Century and its future. Joseph Nye defines it as “the extraordinary period of American preeminence in military, economic, and soft power resources that have made the United States central to the workings of the global balance of power, and to the provision of global public goods”. While the international environment will become more complicated in the future, he announces simply that “the American century is not over”.

The running debates over the future of American power make this an opportune moment to reconsider the foundations of U.S. internationalism, especially in the light of recent innovations in the field of diplomatic history. Over the past fifteen years, terms such as empire, soft power, and anti-Americanism have become commonplace in discussions of America’s role in the world. Foreign policy, power politics, and the work of statesmen and professional diplomats no longer dominate histories of U.S. foreign relations. Current scholarly interest in soft power, public diplomacy, and Americanization have opened the field to the study of culture. “New” diplomatic historians study the role of individuals, networks, musicians, athletes, transnational movements and a wide variety of other forms of “informal” diplomacy. A focus on American action has made room for the study of interaction: the ways in which peoples throughout the world have resisted, negotiated, or welcomed the American presence.

Disciplines and topics
We welcome scholars from all disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds to present fresh insights into the historical foundations of U.S. power and the international order it helped to create during and (immediately) after the Second World War. The following questions may be helpful in formulating contributions to this conference:

(1) How did the War and its aftermath change the practice of diplomacy? How did diplomats develop new strategies to reach out to the world? How did they coopt private initiatives or vice versa?

(2) How did individuals, companies, civic groups, and other “informal” diplomats shape America’s global presence during and after the war?

(3) How did the United States shape the international environment through its support for new diplomatic, financial, and economic institutions? To what extent did those new institutions shape U.S. actions?

(4) How did America’s new role in the world shape its domestic culture, politics, or society?

(5) How have Asians, Africans, Europeans, and Latin Americans resisted, negotiated, or welcomed the new American presence.

(6) How have processes of historical memory and (re)interpretations of World War II shaped U.S. internationalism in domestic and transnational contexts?

Paper Proposals
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers. Please send a 300 word abstract and brief biographical note to j.vandenberk@let.ru.nl by May 15, 2016

Date and location
The conference will take place at the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, on October 27-28, 2016. This conference is an initiative of the North American Studies Program at the Radboud University. For more information about our program and our staff please visit www.ru.nl/nas.
Please note that a small fee may apply for participants in this conference.

An international conference at the John F. Kennedy Institute, Freie Universität Berlin

December 8-10, 2016

Deadline for proposals: June 15, 2016.

The theory and practice of modern business management arose in the late nineteenth century in the United States as a response to unstable markets, labor unrest, and organizational challenges in the new massive industrial corporations of the Gilded Age. As a system of efficiency and control, management soon became a generalized principle for dealing with everything from health, housework, and educational reform to imperial expansion, mass immigration, and related processes of racialization and naturalization. Taking a long view, management could also be regarded as integral to American society and culture from the beginning: from Puritan self-rationalization to the quantified self, from the management of slave plantations to technologies of social control, from the first national census in 1790 to the big data revolution, from the human relations movement to happiness engineers in the workplace today. Particularly since the crisis of Taylorism in the 1970s, the theory and practice of management has undergone significant changes, often replacing the hierarchical bureaucratic structures that emerged during the industrial revolution with more flexible and intimate forms of management that have challenged the separation of work and leisure. Against the backdrop of such changes, as well as in light of what some refer to as a ‘second gilded age’ of celebrated CEOs and technological solutionism, a critical reexamination of our managerial past and present is as urgent as ever.

This conference invites scholars to (re)think the relationship between American literature and culture and the various forms of management that have shaped the United States throughout its history. ‘Fictions of management’ both refers to the narratives underlying different management ideologies and to the cultural views and products that participate in their emergence and transformation. By using this term, the conference seeks to bring ‘fiction’ and ‘management’ broadly conceived into a productive dialogue. What are the fictions underlying corporate culture and managerial responses to society today and in the past? How have different management paradigms been promoted or challenged in American literature and culture? Do different management styles have their own aesthetics, and might we identify managerial aesthetics in cultural productions? Addressing such questions, we especially encourage interdisciplinary approaches to the relationship between fiction and management.

Possible topics for consideration include (but are not limited to):

• cultures of efficiency and waste management
• corporate culture and organizational storytelling
• the relationship between slavery and management
• race and labor management
• dis/ability, productivity, and labor
• social reform and uplift ideologies
• the probabilistic revolution and risk management
• the feminization of labor
• (post)industrial psychology and incentive systems
• management and problems of scale
• self-management, self-optimization, and self-help narratives
• the marginal revolution and the homo economicus
• biopolitics, necropolitics, eugenics, and population management
• ‘algorithmic governmentality’ (Rouvroy)
• processes of standardization
• cultures of bookkeeping and paperwork
• managing consumer behavior
• affect and emotional management

Please send proposals by June 15, 2016 to fictionsofmanagement@gmail.com. Proposals should consists of a 250 word abstract and a short bio (around 100 words).

Conference organizers: James Dorson (Freie Universität Berlin), Florian Gabriel (Freie Universität Berlin), and Jasper Verlinden (Freie Universität Berlin).

The conference is organized by the by the Dahlem International Network Junior Research Group “Fictions of Management: American Naturalism and Managerial Culture, 1875-1925.”

For more on the conference, including keynote speakers, please visit our conference website at www.fictionsofmanagement2016.com

Intersections of Whiteness

Ruhr-University Bochum and TU Dortmund 

January 11-13, 2017

Deadline: July 31, 2016

The protests against racial profiling and racist police brutality in the U.S. and Britain, Donald Trump’s alarming comments about Muslims, the Confederate flag controversy in South Carolina, the all-white Academy Award nominations, the organization “Operation Black Vote” feeling compelled to urge people of color not to leave the political field to white people in the wake of the UK General Elections, the reactions of the European Union to the masses of refugees and many Europeans’ xenophobic reactions to those seeking refuge: the specters of whiteness are still urgently haunting the western world. According to France Winddance Twine and Charles Gallagher, Critical Whiteness Studies is currently in its third stage, riding its third wave so to say, questioning “the tendency towards essentializing accounts of whiteness by locating race as one of many social relations that shape individual and group identity” (2011: 3). While the discipline has established itself as an anti-racist academic and activist practice or mode of intervention, it is still often object to scrutiny for spotlighting whiteness and thus possibly contributing to the continuing dominance of whiteness. In order to dismantle this dominance and to heed Steven Garner’s call for awareness of the “pitfalls” of whiteness studies (2007), we believe it is necessary to identify the intricacies of whiteness in western society and culture from a decidedly transnational/global perspective. The first waves of Critical Whiteness Studies established the discipline as an almost exclusively US-centered field of inquiry whose methodology and theory-building was consequently to a considerable degree focused on US-American particularities, yet whiteness has since the turn of the century become what Vron Ware calls an “interconnected global system”: “it may be produced in one place, but its effects are not containable by cultural or political borders” (2001: 184). This conference aims at making whiteness visible (following Richard Dyer and Valerie Babb). We will do so by discussing the current position of the field and concrete examples that negotiate whiteness with a regional, national and global focus. We are especially interested in the interplay of whiteness and other “social relations that shape individual and group identity” and invite presentations from cultural studies, gender studies, history, literary studies, sociology, anthropology, etc. Whiteness, while it is considered a system of privilege, is informed and created by its intersections with other categories of the self and society. Questions we wish to explore, are: Is whiteness intersectional? How is this intersectionality played out in different disciplines, in different cultures, in different media? While the obvious intersections between whiteness and class, gender, sexuality are very productive, we wish to include questions of region, nation, ability, the body, and religion.

Topics for presentations might include, yet are not limited to:

Whiteness and …
• critical theory
• popular culture (including television shows such as Fargo, Sons of Anarchy, True Detective, Girls, Misfits, Being Human, but also film, music, reality television, etc.)
• comedy (e.g. American standup comedian Louis CK’s deconstructions of white male identity, South African comedian Trevor Noah and others)
• the nation (comparative perspectives: e.g. U.S. <=> U.K., England <=> Wales)
• the region (e.g. the American South, Eastern Germany, the English countryside)
• feminism (e.g. first- and second-wave, post-feminism, cyberfeminism)
• fatness, dis/ability, healthism
• Marxism
• queer identities
• social networks

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words and a short biographical info to the organizers Evangelia Kindinger (Ruhr-University Bochum, American Studies) and Mark Schmitt (TU Dortmund, British Cultural Studies) at intersectionsofwhiteness@gmx.de.
The deadline for paper proposals is July 31, 2016. Speakers will be notified of their acceptance by September 1, 2016.

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Amanda D. Lotz, University of Michigan
Katharine Tyler, University of Exeter
Vron Ware, Kingston University
Matt Wray, Temple University