October 26-28, 2017, Johannes Gutenberg-University, Mainz, Germany.

Conference organizers: Nele Sawallisch, Johanna Seibert, Pia Wiegmink, Frank Obenland

This conference hosted by the Transnational American Studies Institute aims at assessing and theorizing past and present forms of black intellectual, political, and cultural resistance from the era of abolitionist campaigns against the transatlantic slave trade to the recent global protest formation of Black Lives Matter.

Protests against racial discrimination, inequality, poverty, and injustice not only pervade (North) American history but span the globe and cross – oftentimes multiple – borders. Building on the recent transnational turn in American Studies and de-centering American Studies’ focus on the nation as the prime focus of analysis, this workshop invites papers that trace the Atlantic routes/roots (Gilroy), the diasporic and global trajectories, as well as the movement, circulation, and dissemination of past and present forms and ideas of black resistance. The conference aims at discussing the transnational dimension of various forms of resistance that are often embedded in larger social movements such as the anti-slavery, the anti-lynching, the Civil Rights, Black Power, Anti-Apartheid, the Global Justice, the Prison Abolition, or the Black Lives Matter movements. Investigating the transatlantic significance of these movements, this conference will also address how collective or individual acts of resistance are articulated and represented in print, performance, visual art, or other media.

How do we conceptualize the connections between past and present forms of transnational black resistance? How does this relationship between the past and the present shape existing notions of resistance? How did national movements for black equality and justice impact as well as intersect with national and international forms of protest? How do forms of black resistance initiate ways to re-think forms of protest and activism outside the United States? How do protest movements intersect with scholarly and intellectual pursuits in academia? What role have different media played in and for black resistance movements throughout the centuries not only in national but also international contexts? How have the digital world and global social media changed previous forms of transnational black resistance? What could be possible trajectories of movements such as Black Lives Matter in the face of the 2016 Presidential election in the United States? How can scholars and activists collaborate in articulating critical interventions in ongoing political discussions?

Confirmed keynote speaker: Prof. Charmaine Nelson, Professor of Art History, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.

We invite contributions from all disciplines, e.g. history, literary and cultural studies, visual culture/art history, political science, sociology. Potential paper topics could include, but are not limited to:

• transnational routes of political/social activism and cultural resistance/protest cultures

• transnational black intellectual histories of racial equality and justice

• methodological and conceptual perspectives that bring together approaches from transnational American Studies with African American and Black Diaspora Studies

• intersectional approaches to the study of black resistance with regard to class, gender, age, nationality, religion, etc.

• the role of women in and for black resistance movements

• Black literatures of protest and resistance

• Black resistance and cultures of performance, transnational aesthetics of protest

• Black resistance and popular culture, Black resistance and global (social) media

• Intersection of popular resistance movements and academic interventions in political discourse

Please send your paper proposal (max. 300 words) and a short bio (150 words) by January 31, 2017 to sawallis@uni-mainz.de

Shifting Tides, Anxious Borders: A Graduate Student Conference

in Transnational American Studies (8th Annual)

Binghamton University

Saturday, April 8, 2017

Keynote: Russ Castronovo, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Deadline for Proposal Submission: February 24th, 2017

“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, “Globalizing the Commons, Localizing the Transnational”, focuses on the transnational turn in American Studies in an effort to re-think the field imaginary, paying particular attention to the intersecting sites of identity, community, nation, and globalization along with the methodological trajectories which make these sites legible. Keeping in mind recent anthological interventions—Globalizing American Studies (2010), Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies (2011), and American Studies as Transnational Practice (2015), to name just a few—the conference seeks to investigate the conditions through which discussions of the transnational dialectically broaden the scope of the field while underestimating the nuances of the local, and, by the same concern, how local attentiveness precludes visibility of global, coalitional resistance.

In keeping with this year’s focus, we seek papers concerned with the relationships between conceptions of the local, national, and the global, as well as the liminality inherent to the delineation of these spaces. In lieu of examining the well-trodden ground of ‘the state of the field’ and resonant attempts to redefine American studies itself, we encourage papers that attend to more interdisciplinary limits of subjectivity, the state, and global community. We seek papers that localize the transnational, totalize the provincial, and speak to the constituting horizons necessarily produced by these methodologies.

Redolent questions include: How does the global trajectory of capitalism become individualized in neoliberalism? What are the resonances between the global war on terror and the militarization of local police forces? How do identitarian frameworks potentialize coalition while restricting conditions of belonging? More broadly speaking, when considering the roots of the transnational turn are found in the transatlantic, how can we resituate and trouble Occidental cultural dialogues between the United States and Europe? Finally, how is the totalizing schema of the anthropocene configured along local and global registers?

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:

• Archipelagos and the Transnational Pacific
• The Speculative Limits of Finance Capital
• Racialized Transatlantic Histories and Communities
• Mapping Subject and Species through Biopower
• Relationships between Isolationism and American Empire
• Feminist Coalition / Resistance and Co-opting Identity
• Trauma in the Local/Transnational Sites of War on Terror
• Localized Translations / Globalized Dialects
• Multiculturalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Individual
• Dronification as / and Destabilized Imperial Violence

Call for Papers: Virginia Woolf and the World

“As a woman my country is the whole world.” Virginia Woolf’s declaration in Three Guineas gains new meaning in the context of her increasingly global reception and legacy. To capture the many Woolfian currents now circulating around the world, we are proposing a new volume, Virginia Woolf and the World, edited by Jeanne Dubino (Appalachian State University) and Paulina Pajak (Wroclaw University).

Virginia Woolf and the World most broadly considers the global responses Woolf’s work has provoked and her worldwide impact. We are seeking essays on Woolf’s reception, her influence on literature, and her presence in contemporary (bio)fiction around the world. We envision this volume as a comparative one, incorporating both transnational and local developments insofar as they epitomize Woolf’s global reception and legacy. The collection is intended to move beyond the “center” and “periphery” binary, searching for new models of Woolfian global studies and promoting cross-cultural understandings.

We are interested not only in how social, cultural and political differences shape the ways Woolf is read and interpreted in all four corners of the world, but also in the ways Woolf’s works influence local cultures. We invite papers on Woolf’s impact on her contemporary artists, as well as on post-Millennial writers worldwide. Essays that give space to previously underrepresented regions of Woolf’s reception studies are particularly welcome, and will be given special consideration.

We have been in contact with Edinburgh University Press (EUP), who have expressed enthusiastic interest in our project.

If you are interested in contributing to Virginia Woolf and the World, please email a 500-word abstract and a brief biographical note by April 30, 2017, to Jeanne Dubino (dubinoja@appstate.edu) and Paulina Pająk (paula.pajak@gmail.com). Our expectation is that the full version of the essay (5,000-8,000 words) will be completed a year later, by April 30, 2018. We plan to follow the 7th edition (not the 8th!) MLA style for in-text documentation and bibliography.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

Woolf’s Global Reception

• Cultural, political and economic aspects of global Woolf
• New theoretical models for Woolfian global studies
• Transnational and local readings of Woolf’s oeuvre
• Woolf’s translations worldwide
• Woolf’s global and local audiences
• Woolf’s transmediality and adaptations in various regions
• Woolf’s works in transnational and local art
• Woolf’s crossing real and imaginary borders
• Internationalism in Woolf’s writings
• Transnational spaces and characters in Woolf’s works
• Woolf online
• Woolf as a global icon
• Woolf’s heritage industry around the world

Woolf’s Global Legacy

• Woolf’s formal and thematic impact on writers and thinkers worldwide
• Literature and art inspired by Woolf’s oeuvre around the world
• Rewritings of Woolf’s works in different cultures
• Woolf’s role in global and local circulation of feminist ideas
• Woolf as an inspiration for global and local civil rights movements
• Woolf’s role in shaping transatlantic and global modernism
• Hogarth Press translations

Woolf in Global (Bio)Fiction

• Woolf and her circle as characters in contemporary (bio)fiction
• Films, plays and performances relating to Woolf’s life
• Woolf’s biography in music and arts
• The Bloomsbury Group’s global afterlife

We very much hope that Virginia Woolf and the World will demonstrate the diversity of the worldwide reception andlegacy of Woolf’s oeuvre and the remarkable possibilities of transcultural exchange. As Woolf herself wrote, “Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes.”