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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 21st 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
Scholars are invited to send a proposal for the special section of RSAJournal #33 (2022). The proposal should include a title, a description of the general issues addressed by the section, a list of specific topics that can be indicative for authors who may wish to send a submission, and the name(s) and institution(s) of the coordinator(s). The deadline for proposals is October 15, 2021.
Condividiamo locandina e Call for Papers della XXVI Conferenza Biennale AISNA “Crossing Territories. Recognition across Time, Space and Textualities in the US and Beyond” che si terrà presso l’Università dell’Aquila a Settembre 2021.
Si comunica inoltre che il termine per l’invio delle proposte per il convegno è prorogato al 4 luglio 2021. L’accettazione delle proposte verrà notificata entro l’11 luglio 2021.
Per ulteriori aggiornamenti, vi preghiamo di far riferimento al sito della conferenza.
Oggi, lunedì 3 maggio alle 14:30, inizia il Seminario di Letteratura, Storia e Cultura Americana, organizzato dal Centro Studi Americani in collaborazione con AISNA e la U.S. Embassy.
L’edizione 2021, dal titolo “Circulating America(s): History, Aesthetics, Politics”, è incentrata sui temi legati alla circolazione di persone, idee, culture e discorsi in un’ottica interdisciplinare. Per partecipare, potete cliccare qui. Il passcode per effettuare l’accesso è: 123456
CFP: Special Section of RSAJournal (Rivista di StudiAmericani) on “Mapping the Contemporary US Novel: Theories, Forms and Themes”
Issue #32 (2021) 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 Pia Masiero (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) and Virginia Pignagnoli (University of Zaragoza) on “Mapping the Contemporary US Novel: Theories, Forms and Themes.”
Contemporary US novels compose a heterogenous territory whose contours are thematically intertextual, formally intermodal, and intrinsically interdisciplinary: at their pulsating center there lies American reality and the challenge of representing and/or interrogating it. Novelists have long been reality hunters and the changing shape of American contemporary landscape calls for (possibly) new ways of (fictional) representation. In the age of numerous (and baffling) post-post poetics, where, as many argue, everything has already been told, many contemporary authors wonder how the already told may be told anew, how a new pact with the reader may be signed.
In order to better understand the evolution of Anglo-American fiction in the last twenty-years and its possible future developments, the special section aims at presenting the main theories, forms and themes currently emerging in contemporary US novels. The exploration of critical and theoretical discourses, formal devices and narrative strategies will thus intersect with the analysis of the themes and modes influenced by cultural and societal changes such as 9/11, the 2007 financial crisis, the digital revolution, and recent activist movements such as Me Too and Black Lives Matter. Different theoretical approaches are welcome, and topics may include, but are not limited to:
Contemporary American fiction
- genres that attempt to dismantle borders such as autofiction and memoir;
- the crisis novel, planetary fiction, ecofiction;
- contemporary literature and the intersections with the digital turn: digital paratextuality, focus on the “real”;
- novels and authors including Lauren Groff, Maggie Nelson, Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Sheila Heti, Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, Michael Chabon, Jesmyn Ward, George Saunders, Catherine Lacey, Ocean Vuong, Tayari Jones, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, Hanya Yanagihara, Alexander Chee, Ruth Ozeki, R.O. Kwon.
Postmodernism and beyond
- continuities and discontinuities;
- theories of post-postmodernism, transmodernity, metamodernism, cosmodernism, contemporary realism;
- explorations of the post-human, post-truth, post-memory; new sincerity and post-ironic mode;
- issues of relationality, the reader-writer relationship, and intersubjective problems.
Submission details
Please email an abstract (300-400 words, Word or Pdf) and a short CV to the section editors Pia Masiero, masiero@unive.it, and Virginia Pignagnoli, vpignagnoli@unizar.es.
Potential contributors are welcome to get in touch with queries about possible topics prior to abstract submission.
Timeline
Deadline for abstract submission: 15 December 2020
Notification of acceptance: 30 December 2020
Full essay draft (around 6000 words) deadline: 31 March 2021
Contact Information
Pia Masiero
Associate Professor of North American Literature
Department of Linguistic and Comparative Cultural Studies
Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia
masiero@unive.it
Virginia Pignagnoli
“Juan de la Cierva” Research Fellow
Department of English and German Philology
University of Zaragoza
vpignagnoli@unizar.es
RSAJournal: Rivista di Studi Americani asks all AISNA members to send a proposal for a special section to be published in the next issue (#32, 2021).
We have already received a proposal on Mapping the Contemporary US Novel: Theories, Forms and Themes, but we are open to any other suggestion. Proposals (of about 300/500 words) must be sent to the General Editor, Valerio Massimo De Angelis no later than October 31, and must specify the coordinator(s) of the section, who will take full responsibility (with the collaboration of the Editorial Board, of course) for the whole publishing process, from the call of papers to the peer review phase to the correction of proofs.
International conference on women’s autobiographies
Research group FAAAM, University of Paris Ouest Nanterre
“Our sweetest existence is both relative and collective, and our true self does not reside solely within us,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in /Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques/. If autobiography is indeed the reflective act of a remembering self, this self is never an isolated subject and the world is never only a mere stage set for reminiscing.
Sociologist Maurice Halbwachs wrote, “we never remember alone.” Are not the interior and the exterior worlds simply two faces of the same reality? Annie Ernaux, who borrowed Rousseau’s phrase in her /Journal du dehors/ Exteriors/, introduces herself as “crossed by people and their existence like a whore,” since her relationship to the world is
not only an objective of her mind, but a physical and erotic link too.
In /How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves/ (1999), Paul John Eakin encourages us to demystify the self-referential narrative seen as autodiegetic, where the first person subject would first and foremost refer to itself. Eakin states that the first person of autobiography is truly plural in its origins and subsequent formation.
He proposes the terms “relational self” and “relational life,” arguing that all identity is relational and all self-writing is at the crossroads of biography and autobiography, which positions the narrating subject in a larger context—that of the family, the community and the ethnic group. A writing of inwardness may also be perceived as an inscription of otherness and of ‘formerness.’ To write is not only to become an individual, but also to recognize the presence of others in the making of the self.
Autobiography, which is traditionally associated with a certain subjective idealism, is not expected to fully engage with the world, while memoirs, a genre preferred by Anglo-Saxon women, position the writing subjects in a larger environment. As Nancy Miller insisted, memoirs do not draw a clear line between the public and the private since emphasizing the role of the outside world amounts to some socio-political, cultural or ethical risk. It means inhabiting and reappropriating the public space, becoming visible, sharing one’s experience and offering a reflection on history and society. For Helen M. Buss, memoirs are not only representations of women’s personal lives but also of their desire to repossess important parts of our culture, in which women’s stories have not mattered.
From this perspective, the autobiographical project is akin to sociology or history, which it completes without replacing. We may wonder what historical value to attribute to autobiography. What is the relation between autobiography and cultural memory? Betweenautobiography and counter-memory? Autobiography and photography? Beyond the traditional (written) forms of autobiographical narrative, we are interested in other, more contemporary, forms of autobiographical projects.
Several themes may be explored:
1) The autobiographical narrative as testimony/reappropriation/intervention: how do women participate as witnesses of their time? What narrative strategies do they use to
combine/separate/mix individual and collective discourses, private and public discourses? How do women write narratives of historical events or of “conditions of being”? Specific genres such as war stories or slave narratives could be studied.
2) Autobiography and ‘postmemory’ (Hirsch): when second or third generations recount the trauma (war, exile, decolonization, poverty) endured by previous generations in diasporic memoirs, or working class memoirs (Jeanette Winterson, Carolyn Steedman).
3) The places of memory: what is the relation of women’s autobiography to space-time? How is the place of memory represented (cf the garden world of Jamaica Kincaid in /My Garden (Book))? / What role does it play in the construction of the narrative identity in narratives of exile and of migration/, /such as ethnic culinary memoirs /(Myriam’s Kitchen)/? How are the conditions of being part of several worlds and of the postcolonial self expressed?
4) Autobiography in the world’s web: the Self in the virtual world. Do on-line journals increase our connectedness to the world or do they leave us more isolated?
5) Autobiography and the image of (the self in the) world: the referentiality of images tested against writing (photographs inserted into the autobiographical text as visual transmission / mediation between the self and the world, graphic memoirs, etc…); the intersection between personal, political and photographic autobiographies (Jo Spence)
Papers will be given in English (preferred language) or French
200-400 word abstracts (and short bios) to be sent by June 15th 2016 to the co-organizers: Claire Bazin cbaz1@wanadoo.fr and Corinne Bigot corinne.bigot@wanadoo.fr
Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni, Istom, CREA Paris Ouest
Valérie Baisnée, Université de Paris Sud, CREA Paris Ouest
Valérie Baudier, CREA, Paris Ouest
Claire Bazin, CREA, Paris Ouest Nanterre
Corinne Bigot, CREA, Paris Ouest Nanterre
Elisabeth Bouzonviller, Université de Saint Etienne
Stéphanie Genty, SLAM, Université d’Evry-Val d’Essonne
Nathalie Saudo-Welby, CORPUS Université de Picardie Jules Verne
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Buss, Helen M. /Repossessing the World: Reading Memoirs by Contemporary Women/. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002.
Eakin, John Paul. /How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves./ Cornell University Press, 1999.
/____ Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography/. Princeton University Press, 1992.
Ernaux, Annie, /Exteriors/. Seven Stories Press, 1996.
Halbwachs, Maurice. /La Mémoire collective/. Paris: Albin Michel, 1997.
Hirsch, Marianne and Smith, Valerie (eds). “Feminism and Cultural Memory: An Introduction.” /Signs/, Vol. 28, No. 1, Gender and Cultural Memory Special Issue (Autumn 2002): 1-19.
Hirsch, Marianne, /Family Frames:/ /Photography Narrative and Postmemory, /Harvard UP, 1997.
_____________ “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile”, /Poetics Today,/ Vol. 17, No. 4 (1996): 659-690.
Miller, Nancy K. /Bequest & Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent’s Death/. Oxford UP, 1996.
Ricœur, Paul. /La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli/. Paris: Seuil, 2000.
Turkle, Sherry. /Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other/. New York: Basic Books, 2011.
Whitlock Gillian, /Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit, /The University of Washington Press, 2007.
Zanon-Davis, Natalie and Randoph Starn, “Introduction,” /Representations/ 26, Special Issue: “Memory and Counter-Memory” (1989): 1-6.
The intersection of contemporary debates about the future of American power and recent developments in the field of diplomatic history compel us to reconsider the foundations and contours of the American Century.
“Forging the American Century”, seeks to combine the current concern for America’s changing role in the world with new and developing insights into the nature of international relations to revisit the origins of the American Century: World War II and its aftermath. The conference is not about the high diplomacy of the war, nor is it necessarily about the start of the Cold War. Instead, it will address the ways in which the World War and America’s rise to global power drove Americans in different fields, both inside and outside the sphere of formal diplomacy, to forge new connections with the world. We will also address the many ways in which people around the world responded to the new or changing American presence.
By invoking the term “American Century”, we do not intend to link up to Henry Luce’s original arguments. With its confusing mix of jingoism, democratic idealisms, free market enthusiasm, nationalism, and naiveté, Luce’s “American Century” has rarely been taken seriously as a blueprint for American internationalism. However, the concept of an “American Century” has recently made a comeback in discussions about the United States’ relative decline. Can the United States maintain its international economic position in the face of Chinese competition? Have the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq caused irreparable damage to its role as an international leader? Will rising powers, especially the much-discussed BRICS countries, challenge the liberal world order that the United States has built and sustained?
In a recent anthology that he described as a “dissenter’s guide to the American Century”, Andrew Bacevich argues that:
“the conditions that once lent plausibility to visions of an American Century [have] ceased to exist…Contemporary reality no longer accommodate[s] the notion of a single nation arrogating to itself the role of a Good Samaritan, especially a nation with dirty hands…The utility of Luce’s formulation as a description of the contemporary international order or as a guide to future U.S. policy has been exhausted.”
Others have been more optimistic, both about the nature of the American Century and its future. Joseph Nye defines it as “the extraordinary period of American preeminence in military, economic, and soft power resources that have made the United States central to the workings of the global balance of power, and to the provision of global public goods”. While the international environment will become more complicated in the future, he announces simply that “the American century is not over”.
The running debates over the future of American power make this an opportune moment to reconsider the foundations of U.S. internationalism, especially in the light of recent innovations in the field of diplomatic history. Over the past fifteen years, terms such as empire, soft power, and anti-Americanism have become commonplace in discussions of America’s role in the world. Foreign policy, power politics, and the work of statesmen and professional diplomats no longer dominate histories of U.S. foreign relations. Current scholarly interest in soft power, public diplomacy, and Americanization have opened the field to the study of culture. “New” diplomatic historians study the role of individuals, networks, musicians, athletes, transnational movements and a wide variety of other forms of “informal” diplomacy. A focus on American action has made room for the study of interaction: the ways in which peoples throughout the world have resisted, negotiated, or welcomed the American presence.
Disciplines and topics
We welcome scholars from all disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds to present fresh insights into the historical foundations of U.S. power and the international order it helped to create during and (immediately) after the Second World War. The following questions may be helpful in formulating contributions to this conference:
(1) How did the War and its aftermath change the practice of diplomacy? How did diplomats develop new strategies to reach out to the world? How did they coopt private initiatives or vice versa?
(2) How did individuals, companies, civic groups, and other “informal” diplomats shape America’s global presence during and after the war?
(3) How did the United States shape the international environment through its support for new diplomatic, financial, and economic institutions? To what extent did those new institutions shape U.S. actions?
(4) How did America’s new role in the world shape its domestic culture, politics, or society?
(5) How have Asians, Africans, Europeans, and Latin Americans resisted, negotiated, or welcomed the new American presence.
(6) How have processes of historical memory and (re)interpretations of World War II shaped U.S. internationalism in domestic and transnational contexts?
Paper Proposals
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers. Please send a 300 word abstract and brief biographical note to j.vandenberk@let.ru.nl by May 15, 2016
Date and location
The conference will take place at the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, on October 27-28, 2016. This conference is an initiative of the North American Studies Program at the Radboud University. For more information about our program and our staff please visit www.ru.nl/nas.
Please note that a small fee may apply for participants in this conference.
PhD in Literary, Linguistic and Comparative Studies
Graduate Conference 2016
Keynote speaker: Edgar Radtke
The second edition of the Graduate Conference of the PhD in Literary, Linguistics and Comparative Studies will be devoted to investigating the concept of limen in its various meanings: limen as threshold, textual and meta-textual margin; limen as border, boundary; limen as extreme limit; limen as in-betweenness, the threshold of consciousness and perception. You can refer to limen as what defines, separates, combines, allows the crossing and contamination, the identification or differentiation. It can be fixed, variable, incorporated or invented and is understood as an object in its literal meaning or as a metaphorical concept. The organizing committee is pleased to welcome scholars from different disciplines to address the topic of fringe forms and border speeches from traditional or unusual perspectives, in order to offer a comprehensive analysis of this multilayered concept with ambivalent meanings. The concept of limen can then be related to all forms of marginalization in literature, linguistics and the arts, according to a literary, critical, linguistic, philological, semiotic, anthropological, medial approach. The committee will accept proposals which analyze the theme along an interdisciplinary trajectory, highlighting the arbitrariness of each label. Looking forward to further proposals, some of the key topics that will be the focus of the conference are listed below: I) TEXTUAL CROSSINGS -Comments, glosses, annotations -Notes -Re-writings -Critiques and interpretations -Translations
I) TEXTUAL CROSSINGS -Comments, glosses, annotations -Notes -Re-writings -Critiques and interpretations -Translations
II) BOUNDARIES BETWEEN ART AND CULTURE -Border and hybrid identities as topics -Culture, literature, arts, cinema and authors on the edge -Movements and dialogues between different cultural and artistic expressions -Theater as boundary form, shape and space
III) LINGUISTIC MARGINALITY -Linguistic contamination and language contacts -Marginal aspects on all linguistic levels -Marked and /or atypical forms -Dialects, interlanguages, pidgins, creole languages
ABSTRACT SUBMISSIONS AND CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS PhD candidates and early-career researchers interested in taking part to the Graduate Conference should send an outline (400 words max., excluding title and possible bibliography from word count) to graduateconf@unior.it by May 10, 2016. Applications should include the following: personal information (name, surname, e-mail address, institutional affiliation), thematic area, presentation type. Please, submit all electronic application materials as a single PDF or DOC file. Applicants may participate with a 15-minute paper or with a poster (118 x 165 cm max., printed on a lucid or opaque board). In the opening of the posters-dedicated session, each poster creator will give a 3-minute talk on his or her project and invite conference-goers to directly question him or her. The duration of this session will be defined according to the total number of poster presentations. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by July 10, 2016. All the speakers will be invited to send their talk by December 31, 2016, for the publication of the conference proceedings, edited by the Organizing Committee and by the PhD Scientific Committee.
All expenses will be covered by participants. Further information (conference venues, accommodations, social dinner) are available on the conference page http://www.unior.it/ateneo/12487/1/graduate- conference.html Questions about the conference are welcome and may be directed to the email address below. Official languages: Italian and English. Contacts: graduateconf@unior.it
Organizing Committee: Margherita De Blasi Giulia Imbriaco Felice Messina Salvatore Orlando Valentina Schettino
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