***UPDATE: Please note extended deadline and corrected contact information
for abstracts***
Crash / Landings: Friction and Flow in the American City

The New York Metro American Studies Association (NYMASA)
invites papers for our annual one-day conference,
co-sponsored by the Columbia Journal of American Studies (CJAS),
to be held on Saturday, October 28, 2006.
Location to be announced.
Extended deadline for abstracts: Monday, May 8, 2006
As we've seen from the New Orleans flood, the NYC transit strike, and the
Oscar-winning film "Crash," the U.S. city is a site of multiple
collisions--of
race, class, ethnicity, generations, desires, fears, and expectations. It
is
also, as Mary Louise Pratt and others have argued, a contact zone--an
improvisational space of often surprising cultural exchange and creativity.
To
explore these contradictions, the 2006 NYMASA conference invites papers on
the
sometimes violent but always productive juxtapositions that occur in urban
spaces.
We are interested in presentations that address the American city as a site
of contact, collision, and community. What kinds of movements--of peoples,
capital, knowledge, and culture--distinguish the city? What instant or
enduring intimacies are generated from the friction of crowded streets,
subways,
freeways? How is the eco-system of the city reshaped by gentrification or
zoning disputes--and enriched by aesthetic and political responses to
specific
socio-economic conditions? How have urban social movements shaped American
cities historically, and how are they remembered, memorialized, replayed,
and
recast? How do images, narratives, histories, maps and other
representations
make urban friction and flow (in)visible?
We also invite considerations of American Studies as a site of collision,
friction and flow. Are there zoning restrictions implicit in American
Studies
as an (inter)discipline, and how are they being contested? What
methodologies and theoretical approaches are required to grasp the
complexities of the
city as a contested zone? How do urban challenges enable us to rethink the
objects of study in American Studies?
We particularly encourage submissions that discuss urban spaces before the
20th century, and presentations that cross historical and disciplinary
boundaries. We welcome presentations on transnational topics, but papers
should
demonstrate some connection to the study of the United States.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
--Landing in the city: migration/immigration, city as refuge and asylum,
city as "mecca"

--Diaspora and the global city: transculturation, appropriation, tourism

--Imperialism, policing, surveillance and the occupied city

--The economics of urban "flow": labor and capital in the city

--Aesthetics of urban experience: fashion, art, music, dance, theatre

--Culture clashes, subcultural frissons: hip hop, reggaeton, graffiti; drag,
genderqueer

--Geographies of urban culture and motion

--Final landings: urban burial sites, memorials, landfills

--City as landscape or ecosystem: wildlife, community agriculture,
pollution

--Zoning disputes: defining and arranging city space, demolition,
rebuilding, gentrification

--Catastrophe, disaster, violence

--Political frictions: tensions between local and national politics

--Urban social/political movements: riots, strikes, demonstrations,
rebellions

--Crashing the party: social climbing, scandal and gossip,
physical/economic accessibility

--Cities in transit: walking in the city, biking as resistance, commuting,
car culture

--Urban intimacies: sex clubs, red light districts, queering the city,
new domesticities

--Imagination or reality? Representations versus experiences of the urban
environment

--Sensory experience and urban affect: feeling (in) the city

--Theoretical contact zones: intersectionality, activist theory, collisions
of theory/practice

--Documenting urban flow: ethnography, journalism, film, indie media,
activist video

Extended deadline: Abstracts (300 words) for proposed presentations are due
Monday, May 8, 2006 via email to Sarah Chinn (_sarah.chinn_at_hunter.cuny.edu_
(mailto:sarah.chinn_at_hunter.cuny.edu) ).
NYMASA website: _www.nymasa.org_ (http://www.nymasa.org/)

****
Shifra Diamond
Doctoral Student
Human Sciences: Program in Language, Culture & Society
George Washington University
E-mail: sdiamond_at_gwu.edu

         ==========================================================
              From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
                        CFP_at_english.upenn.edu
                         Full Information at
                     http://cfp.english.upenn.edu
         or write Jennifer Higginbotham: higginbj_at_english.upenn.edu
         ==========================================================
Received on Mon May 01 2006 - 08:47:24 EDT