cfp.english.upenn.edu

**Update: Conference location added.**

The New York Metro American Studies Association (NYMASA) and the Columbia
Journal of American Studies (CJAS) announce a call for papers for our 2008
annual one-day conference:

Circulations: Economies, Currencies, Movements in American Studies

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Fordham University, Lincoln Center Campus

9:00am-5:30pm

Circulations: blood, ideas, books, money, people, contagions, politics,
trade. All of these economies, both literal and figurative, operate
within and across the porous boundaries of the United States. From the
virtual circulation of futures markets and viral video to the embodied
circulation of migrants and goods, the economies of the United States ride
any number of waves of circulation, some voluntarily, some much less so.

The goal of this conference is to investigate, interrogate, interrupt, and
intervene in the various circulatory systems that run through both the
United States of America and American Studies. How do ideas, people, and
goods circulate? How do different kinds of economies and currencies –
monetary and otherwise – shape us and the field of American Studies? To
what extent are metaphors of circulation useful in imagining intellectual
networks, such as those produced by the Internet, trans-disciplinary (and
transnational) collaborations, or academic activism? How, too, are limits
on movement like incarceration and immigration restriction connected to
enforced movements like extraordinary rendition and deportation? How do
we theorize the metastasizing meanings of circulation? How do we study
moving targets? What challenges does the study of circulations pose to
traditional forms of knowing and scholarship, and what opportunities does
it make available? How might we reconfigure Marxist, post-structuralist,
or other theoretical approaches in American Studies to account for these
new global, economic, and political circuits? How do we construct
archives for studying such mobile phenomena?

In imagining this conference, we invite participants to engage with any of
the following issues (or any other this topic inspires):

Circulating people: migration, displacement, diaspora

Political movements, political economies

Distressed economies: panics, depressions, recessions

Psychic economies: panics, depressions, repressions

Aesthetic economies and art markets

Transnational economies: remittances, tourism, global circuits

Knowledge economies and intellectual exchange

Informal economies: mix-tapes, novelties, networks, survival crimes

Virtual circulations: viral video, memes, folksonomies, wiki wisdom

Bodily circuits, physical circulations

Circulating currents: electricity, excitement, change

Print circulation: underground, academic, institutional

Circulars: periodicals, publications, pamphlets

Circulating libraries, old and new

Libidinal circuits: kinship networks, love triangles, prostitution rings,
circuit parties, sex tourism

Gender circuits and feminist waves

Congested circuits: traffic, density, crashes

Speculating in futures/speculating on the future

Fashions and fads: going into/coming out of circulation

Bad currency: loans, debts, IOUs

Recycling: biological and ecological recirculations (air, blood, power,
water, waste)

Enforced movement and/or enforced stillness

Cornering the market

Corrupted circulation: fakes, frauds, plagiarists

Moving vehicles, moving violations

Legal tender: slavery, trafficking, exploitation

Contagion and epidemics, transmissions of affect

Ethical economies and circuits of responsibility

We welcome papers on any historical period in American Studies, as well as
21st century topics. We particularly encourage presentations that
circulate across historical and disciplinary borders. Please note that we
will accept abstracts for individual paper presentations only, not pre-
constituted panels.

Please send well-developed abstracts of 200-300 words to
nymasa08_at_gmail.com by June 1, 2008. Please write “NYMASA Conference” in
the subject line.

For more information, visit our website at www.nymasa.org or send an e-
mail to sarah.chinn_at_hunter.cuny.edu .

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Received on Tue May 13 2008 - 11:52:22 EDT