Two Panel Call For Papers at the Irish Association for American Studies/British Association of American Studies Conference at Queen’s University, Belfast, 7-9 April 2016
Scholarship on the Mexican-American border has dominated the field of border studies for the past forty years, from the publication of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera in 1987 to the present. Yet the forty-ninth parallel remains an under-examined yet critical divide, separating Indigenous tribes and cultivating distinct colonial and neo-colonial histories in both Canada and the United States. Richard Ford’s most recent novel, Canada, examines the complex relationship of America to its northern neighbour, focusing on how one young white boy remakes his identity once he has crossed the 49th parallel, albeit with relative ease. While the novel portrays the Prairies and later Central Canada, looking specifically at the Windsor-Detroit border, Ford offers a distinctly American vision of Canada. Using the theme of border-crossings and revolutions (and recalling that during the American Revolution, many British Loyalists fled northward to what was to become British North America), the organizers are interested in papers that consider the relevance of the Canada-US border from an American Studies perspective.
Topics may include but are not limited to:
- border security and surveillance
- innovative approaches to border theory and the concept of hemispheric studies (typically dominated by the United States)
- American exceptionalism and the border
- space/place and the 49th parallel
- que(e)rying the border
- borders and regions
- revolutionary borders
- Indigenzing the border
- border claims after the human rights revolution
- trauma, testimony, and geopolitical reconciliation
- cultural memory and the revolutionary moment
- how the revolutionary spirit is maintained
- mobilizing (counter)revolutionary affects across borders
Please send abstract (250 words maximum) and a brief (2-3 sentence) scholarly biography by September 15th, 2015 to Jennifer Andrews and Richard Cole.