ethnicity and national identity

This panel explores different urban spaces depicted in popular French and Francophone cultural production, such as crime and science fiction artworks. What are the connotations of urban spaces and how are they represented in these narratives? What does it mean for crime to be located in a particular space? What do construals of futuristic cityscapes say about our understanding of present-day cities? How do these descriptions compare to earlier representations of urban spaces, such as those that appear in realist novels, historical fiction, theater or poetry?

The third issue of JAm It! (Journal of American Studies in Italy) will explore the relations between environmental transformations and migrations in the North American context from a multi-disciplinary perspective. While scholarship in American Studies has produced relevant contributions analyzing the historical and present contingencies of both endogenous and exogenous migratory flows, the complex relations between migrations and ecological change require further inquiry within the field.

In their seminal book, Islands in History and Representation, Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith famously point out that stories about islands tend “to slip the net of postcolonial theorising” due to their marginality in terms of geopolitics and academic representation. Accordingly, researchers of Island Studies, an emerging field in the past two decades, have long maintained that due to their geographical and geostrategic singularity, or “islandness,” the (post)colonial conditions of island societies deserve special attention, and the study of which requires a different set of concepts and methodologies than what are available or predominant in Postcolonial Studies.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference, inaugurated in 1992, is the oldest and longest-running annual meeting of its kind in the United States. It encompasses colonial and postcolonial histories, literatures, creative and performing arts, politics, economics, and all other aspects of the countries formerly colonized by Britain and other European powers.

    We welcome a variety of approaches and viewpoints, and the generation of wide-ranging, productive debates. Thus we are particularly interested in interdisciplinary and/or cross-cultural panel proposals.

In recent years Jesmyn Ward’s workhas received significant critical attention for its stark depiction of race, class, and gender dynamics through Bois Sauvage, microcosm of a rural South typically marginalized in the US imaginary. However, her most recent novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, while still deeply invested in a specific, southern time and place, engages with peripheries in which these categories are constructed. Where does life intersect with death, sickness clash with health, or freedom meet incarceration?