CFP: Shifting Tides, Anxious Borders Transnational Studies Graduate Conference

full name / name of organization: 
Shifting Tides, Anxious Borders

Shifting Tides, Anxious Borders: A Graduate Student Conference
in Transnational American Studies (7th Annual) at Binghamton University

Theme: "Occupying Nations and Exceptional (dis)Placements"

Date: Saturday, April 9, 2016

Keynote: Professor Anne McClintock

Deadline for Proposal Submission: March 2nd, 2016

"Shifting Tides, Anxious Borders" is an interdisciplinary graduate conference dedicated to exploring the changing contours of the field of American Studies. This year's conference theme, "Occupying Nations and Exceptional (dis)Placements," focuses on the theme of exile, otherness, and displacement in local, national, and global contexts. We aim to think transnational American Studies in relationship to occupied spaces of nation and state; we are interested in how these occupations enact, normalize, and hegemonize imperial logics and their displacing effects - materially, historically, and ontologically. While we are interested in excavating the violence endemic to producing subjectivities like the refugee, the migrant, and the occupied, we are also concerned with the national discourses and state policies that potentialize, effect, and exceptionalize these displacements.

In keeping with this year's focus, we seek papers concerned with the various states of occupation and their effects. How can we revisit, rethink, and reconceptualize the exceptional discourses that have arisen from such occupations? How do we narrativize such experiences or attempt to unsettle the discourses of power, nation, occupancy, or displacement? How can we read the logic of occupation through the national lens of burgeoning militarism in U.S. police actions generally, but also in places like Oakland, Baltimore, and Ferguson? How does the American drone program reconstellate what it means for a foreign power to displace? How does the act of displacement by occupatory force become (mis)represented within hegemonic narratives of migration and exile? Countering such a trajectory, how can movements like Occupy Wall Street, Civil Rights sit-ins, and Black Lives Matter adopt the strategies of occupation as a platform for political critique and structural resistance? We welcome panel and paper submissions that follow these and similar lines of inquiry.

Rather than having traditional moderators, we are planning to have respondents manage each panel. Respondents will read their panel's papers prior to the conference, and will provide feedback, offer questions, and direct the conversation after the panel has presented. Because of this, we ask for completed papers by no later than one week prior to the conference.

To submit a paper proposal, send a 250-word abstract to shiftingborders@gmail.com. To submit a panel proposal, include the names and email addresses of three participants, with individual paper abstracts and a 150-word abstract uniting them. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
• Settler Colonialism as Perpetual Occupations
• Historical Fiction as Excavating Displaced Narratives
• Imperial Nationalisms
• Transnational Politics of the Diaspora
• Constructions of Refugees
• Re-emergence of Colonial Pasts
• Non-Violent and Violent Resistance
• Humanitarian Crises and Global Interventions
• Orientalism and "the Migrant"
• Archipelagos and the Transnational Pacific
• The Triangle Trade as Occupation
• Cosmopolitanism as Critique and Complacency
• Speculative Economies as Material Displacements
• New Strategies of Occupation in Globalization
• Ecological Catastrophes and Militarized Responses
• Specters of Un/In-habited Places
• Critiques of National and Global Progress
• Refuge in/of Fiction or Fictions as/in Refuge