This issue of Ampersand: An American Studies Journal invites submissions that take up the concept of the “American assemblage”. 

Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s assemblage theory (agencement), assemblages operate as dynamic, heterogeneous humans/nonhuman configurations that produce, sustain, or challenge power. Attuned to this theoretical framework, this issue approaches agency as emergent from shifting constellations of social, material, and affective forces rather than as a coherent whole. With this in mind, we seek to consider what becomes legible when “America” is apprehended as a provisional and contested arrangement, continually composed and decomposed through relation, movement, and struggle.

We are particularly interested in scholarship that attends to the uneven material substrates of the nation-state: the infrastructures of labor and capital; the racialized and gendered ordering of bodies; the governance of sexuality; the extraction and exhaustion of land; the circulation of affect. How do these elements conjoin, sediment, or fracture? In what ways do such assemblages sustain colonial modernity, and where do they expose its instabilities?

Similarly, we also invite contributors to reflect on how archives and assemblages might differently mediate these questions. What becomes possible when method turns from a stable, bounded “archive” toward a more dispersed assemblage of sources, one that gathers together material culture, visual culture, film and media, and digital ephemera in order to trace the forces that shape, push, and pull at agency? How might such nontraditional constellations of evidence unsettle normative archival logics and better register the contingent alignments through which “America” is made and unmade?

Topics could include, but are not limited to: 

• Infrastructures of labor, logistics, and capital (e.g., warehouses, gig platforms, border regimes) and the forms of life they organize

• Racialized and gendered arrangements of bodies in institutions. 

• Governance of sexuality and intimacy through law, policy, medicine, or media representations

• Extraction, contamination, and exhaustion of land, water, and other resources, including Indigenous and decolonial responses

• Circulations of affect in social movements, popular culture, and networked media

• Material and visual cultures (art, film, television, advertising, digital images) that assemble or contest “America”

• Digital assemblages, including platforms, algorithms, and online communities, and their entanglements with state and corporate power

• Nontraditional archives and assemblages of sources (ephemera, oral histories, architectural traces, social media, or everyday objects) that track how agency is shaped, constrained, or reconfigured

• The idea of “America” as an assemblage of geography, culture, and coloniality 

We welcome interdisciplinary and antidisciplinary work that understands method itself as an assemblage that actively participates in the worlds it apprehends. Submissions may engage queer and trans theory, Black feminist thought, Indigenous studies, disability studies, decolonial critique, political economy, affect theory, or the environmental humanities, among other formations. We invite full-length research articles, shorter theoretical interventions, and formally experimental essays.

Please email abstracts (300-500 words) to ampersandjournalbu@gmail.com by April 1, 2026. 

Revisions will take place in May and final drafts will be expected by June 1, 2026; 7000 words max. 

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

DeLanda, Manuel. Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh University Press, 2016.