ethnicity and national identity

This panel explores how Asian American literature, film, and television depict the diasporic struggle to assimilate, resist, and reconstruct identity within spaces and places in the United States. Spaces and places here refer to the urban/suburban/rural, the home, institutions, transitory spaces like highways, but also the lack of space, moments of displacement, and the absence of place. Where do we as readers and audiences find the Asian American physically? What are the affordances of such spaces and places in their construction of the Asian American individual? We welcome submissions that consider when and where Asian Americans can or cannot exist within the diasporic canon.

This is an Emergency (Archive): Recording, Remembering, Resisting, Refusing Under Catastrophe 

Editors: Kathryn Manis, Bibhushana Poudyal, Patty Wilde, and Ma-Ya

This year’s conference theme invites participants to reflect on “regeneration in the sense of bringing forth… a new entity that is more powerful, vigorous, efficient, and healthier.” This selection of terms immediately evokes vitalism—a philosophy of regeneration centered on dynamism, productivity, energy, life force, creativity, and strength. Vitalism emerged in response to mechanistic and materialist accounts of life; though often dismissed by the end of the nineteenth century as a pseudo-science, vitalism has endured as a complex and influential philosophical framework from the twentieth century to the present. Authoritarian regimes in the early twentieth century appropriated vitalist ideas and imagery in support of fascism.

The 2026 American Studies Association of Norway Conference looks back to its early years for inspiration. The very first themed ASANOR seminar was titled “The Bicentennial of the US Constitution.” Many years later we return to this document, not only to revisit its cultural and historical significance but also to ask what it means to invoke the Constitution now, in a time of intensifying democratic crisis and rising illiberalism. From the expansion of executive power to attacks on voting rights, judicial independence, and press freedoms, many of the traditional pillars of U.S. liberal democracy are under threat. However, illiberalism is not new to the American experience.

 Edited by Professor Meenakshi Bharat (University of Delhi) and Dr. Blythe Worthy (University of Sydney)
Under preparation for submission to the ReFocus: International Directors series, Edinburgh University Press

Special Issue of the William Carlos Williams Review: Williams’s Latin American and Caribbean Heritage

Call for Panel Participants

College Art Association Annual Conference

18-21 February 2026   |   Chicago, IL  USA

https://caa.confex.com/caa/2026/webprogrampreliminary/Session16720.html

“Dissent Nearby: Diasporic & LGBTQ+ Resistance”*

*guaranteed session with Sponsorship from the Society of Contemporary Art Historians