CFP: Special Section of RSAJournal (Rivista di StudiAmericani) on “Sites of Emergency, States of Exception”

Issue #33 (2022) of RSAJournal: Rivista di Studi Americani, the official journal of the Italian Association for North American Studies (Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord-Americani – AISNA), included in the A-list of scientific journals by the Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of University and Research (ANVUR), will feature a special section, edited by Valerio Massimo De Angelis (University of Macerata) and Giorgio Mariani (University of Roma “Sapienza”), on “Sites of Emergency, States of Exception.”

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, that has elicited various and unprecedented forms of response by national and supranational governments, societies and cultures, and more simply humankind itself, the issue of how to address critical situations that create sites of emergency and call for extraordinary measures has become absolutely central in public debate. The pandemic is an example of the sudden and unexpected (or, better, expected but more or less consciously set aside by decision makers all over the world) disruption of the structure of individual and collective life at a global level, but is only the symptom of a wider and more general situation that has been rapidly evolving in the last decades, since the so-called “Great Acceleration” of the Anthropocene, which is usually considered as dating from the end of World War II and the beginning of the Atomic Age, with the explosion of the first atomic bomb in New Mexico in July 1945.

The globalization of a world by now totally “colonized” by the human species up to the point of having changed its geological status had as its primary engine the United States of America, so that until the beginning of the 21^st century globalization and Americanization were almost synonyms. The interconnectedness of all the elements of the global network has multiplied the occasions of local crises turning into world phenomena, and the various sites of emergency that have been springing everywhere have often had among its main causes the US political, economic, cultural and military strategies, but on the other hand the United States too has become extremely susceptible to events and processes originating elsewhere, in a short-circuit that was made dramatically visible on September 11, 2001, with the final outcome of a series of causes and effects which eventually became causes of other effects across continents. So decades of “emergencies” directly or indirectly created in the Middle East by US politics collapsed in the backlash of Ground Zero, and this end result triggered another series of consequences by inaugurating a season of “states of exception,” home and abroad, that severely questioned the very foundations of American democracy.

Since its introduction in Western political thought by Carl Schmitt, in the 1920s, the notion of “state of exception” has usually had the meaning of a critical condition that justifies the direct action of the sovereign, beyond the limits of the rule of law, in the name of the public good. Recent theorizations by Giorgio Agamben, Elaine Scarry and Achille Mbembe have pointed out that states of exception have never been “real” exceptions to law, but have instead always been predicted by law, as an instrument of augmentation of the sovereign’s power – that is, of the ultimate source of law, except in modern democracies. The United States is the first country to have been founded ex novo according to democratic principles, when the British colonies in North America became a site of emergency from the point of view of the colonists themselves, who saw their de facto independence from the mother country threatened by the resurgence of imperial power, and then declared the necessity to create an exception, dictated by the “necessity which constrain[ed] them to alter their former Systems of Government,” as stated in the Declaration of Independence. In other words, the United States was born as a State of Exception in itself, due to the fact that it excluded the sovereign as a legitimate source of power and substituted him with “the People” on the basis of the emergency created by the sovereign exceeding his potestas and claiming an auctoritas which was not recognized by the colonial subjects – the “exception” of the head of State going beyond the limits set to his power over the colonies finally resulting in the colonies creating a new, different “exception,” which obeyed to new and different rules.

It is an ironic contradiction that the first “exceptional” State – born on the assumption that no state of exception could warrant the excessive power of the sovereign – has become an imperial power systematically exceeding the rules of law by imposing on various (national and international) sites of emergency its own rules of exception (and also rejecting instances of superior legality such as international courts). And it is even more ironic that in the current situation, where the site of emergency is the whole world, the United States has first, under the Trump administration, even refused to recognize that an emergency existed, and then has come to request, under the Biden administration, the suspension of patents to allow the poorer countries access to the vaccines, in the name of a global state of exception determined by the pandemic emergency.

The couplet “emergency/exception” can therefore involve many more meanings than could be expected, and with many different ideological features. This special issue intends precisely to explore how sites of emergency and the recourse to states of exception have shaped American history, and how they have been represented, analyzed and interpreted by American culture..

Submission details

Please email an abstract (about 200 words, Word for Windows) and a short (about 10 lines) CV to the section editors Valerio Massimo De Angelis (vmdeangelis@gmail.com; valerio.deangelis@unimc.it) and Giorgio Mariani (Giorgio.mariani@uniroma1.it).

Potential contributors are welcome to get in touch with queries about possible topics prior to abstract submission.

Timeline

Deadline for abstract submission: January 15, 2022

Notification of acceptance: January 30, 2022

Deadline for full essay draft (around 40,000 types, spaces included): April 30, 2022