cfp.english.upenn.edu

Call for Papers / SASA 2011
“Peoples, Publics, and Places of the Souths”

Georgia State University will host the SASA 2011 conference, “Peoples, Publics, and Places of the Souths,” in downtown Atlanta, February 17 – February 19, 2011. We are excited to host a conference on the U.S., Hemispheric, and Global Souths in a city where they so prominently converge. Atlanta began as railroad junction designed to link the regions of the United States, and via their ports, the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. It is now a cosmopolitan metropolis, the home of migrants and settlers from around the globe and the nation’s busiest airport. Atlanta, which some postulate is shorthand for Atlantica-Pacifica, has served and continues to serve as a crossroads, a switching point, and a terminus of the three souths.

We invite our colleagues in American Studies, Southern Studies, and all related fields of study to join us in interdisciplinary investigations of the interconnections among the U.S., Hemispheric, and Global Souths. As always, we encourage graduate students to present papers. SASA’s Critoph Prize is an award for the best graduate student paper given at the conference; it includes a certificate and a check for $250 as well as recognition at the next SASA meeting. While we hope to attract a host of comparative, cross-cultural, transnational and transregional projects, we are open to a wide range of topics, panels, and presentations. Topics might include:

Plantation economies and post-plantation cultures
Port cities, maritime networks, and aquatic regions
African-American return South migrations
Food ways, culinary cultures, sustainable agricultures
Queer capitals and communities
Vernacular architecture and regional identities
Questioning the solid South
Public cultures, public performances
Transregional and transoceanic artistic, cultural, and literary relations
New World and New Southern Studies
Monuments, memorials, and museums
Creole languages and lifeways
Post-First/Third World theorizations
Social movements across borders
Obama and the Three Souths
Postcolonialism and the U.S. South
Occupied territories and contested terrains
Political ecologies and economies
Indigenous nations and Native networks
African-American perspectives on the Souths
Southern Silicon Valleys

Please send proposals that include a 150-200 word abstract and a one-page C.V. for each participant on an individual or session proposal to Christine Skwiot at cskwiot@gsu.edu.

Deadline: September 15, 2010.