Issue #30 (2019) of RSAJournal: Rivista di Studi Americani, the official journal of the Italian Association for North American Studies (Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord-Americani – AISNA) will feature a special section, edited by the general editor of RSAJournal, Valerio Massimo De Angelis, and by the Director of the Centro Altreitalie (Torino), Maddalena Tirabassi, on “Mobilities and Citizenship: Rethinking Migrations, Individual and Collective Civil Rights, and their Representations in American History and Culture from the Colonial Age to the Present.”
In February 2018, the mission statement of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a federal agency charged with immigrant affairs, was radically changed, and the words “America’s promise as a nation of immigrants,” promoting “an awareness and understanding of citizenship” along with “ensuring the integrity of our immigration system,” were deleted, to be substituted with the intimation that the immigration policy of the USA must tend towards “adjudicating requests for immigrant benefits” while “protecting Americans” and “securing the homeland.” This stark opposition between “immigrants” and “Americans” tells a lot about the recent and brutal dismantling of what since the founding of the first English Colonies in North America has always been one of the central tenets of the American concept of national identity, citizenship, and civil rights – i.e., the inextricable interconnection between the endless flow of migration waves and the necessity to accomodate them in a social and political structure inevitably bound to continually redefine itself and the set of duties and rights upon which belonging to “America” as its citizens is based.
The special section aims at exploring the complex and contradictory development of this dynamics, and the ways in which it has been represented, celebrated and criticized by American culture. All disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches are welcome, and topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Early European migrations to North America
- Citizenship in Colonial British America
- Inner migrations before the Revolution
- The American Revolution and transatlantic mobilities
- Migrations in the early Republic
- The new American citizen
- Forced migrations – slavery and (non-)citizenship
- Racial theories, migrations and removals in Jacksonian America
- Manifest Destiny and westward movements
- The redefinition of citizenship before and after the Civil War
- Postbellum inner migrations
- The new technologies of mobility and the moving citizen
- Early 20th-century mass migrations and the “melting” of American citizenship
- 20th-century American Imperialism, migrations and citizenship
- Migrations between the two World Wars
- Citizenship on the front – military mobilities
- The Cold War and the “fixing” of Americannes
- The mobility of the Civil Rights movement(s)
- Ethnicities on the move – global diasporas and American citizenship
- The “mobile” postmodern citizen
- Virtual mobility and virtual citizenship
- Migrants and citizens in the Trump era
If you are interested in submitting an article, please send to Valerio Massimo De Angelis (vmdeangelis@gmail.com) and Maddalena Tirabassi (madtirabassi@gmail.com) a title, a very brief abstract of the article (10 lines max), and a short biographical sketch by December 10, and we will get back to you by December 24. The deadline for article submissions by authors whose titles and abstracts have been accepted is April 15, 2019.
