Our conference invites papers by both literary scholars and historians who examine the varied forces which forged new identities among the communing and colliding inhabitants of the “Atlantic rim”—of the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. In particular we will explore how new identity creation enabled these peoples to imagine and enact not only the common bonds of civil society, but also the bondage of subjugation and slavery, and sometimes the opposition to that bondage. To promote interdisciplinary connections more fully, we plan as much as possible to mix literary and historical papers in our concurrent sessions. We invite individual submissions and full panels dealing with identity and empire throughout the “Atlantic rim,” both in the Anglo-American, Iberian and Francophone worlds, and also among Africans and Native Americans. Keynote speakers are Ira Berlin, The University of Maryland Barry Gaspar, Duke University Stephen J. Greenblatt, Harvard University

Creating Identity and Empire in the Atlantic World, 1492-1888
An Interdisciplinary Conference

September 17-18, 2004

The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Featured Speakers: Ira Berlin, The University of Maryland
Barry Gaspar, Duke University
Stephen J. Greenblatt, Harvard University

Since Columbus’s first western encounters, the Atlantic world has seen the creation of numerous identities. These new forms of individual and shared selfhood produced, with astonishing speed and sometimes terrible violence, vast new empires. These identities have been shaped by trans-Atlantic transformations of race, religion, language, gender, class, science, commerce, region, and nation, and each has presented new ways of answering the old questions: “Who am I?” “Who are we?” “Who are you?” and perhaps most perilously, “What are you to us?”

Our conference invites papers by both literary scholars and historians who examine the varied forces which forged new identities among the communing and colliding inhabitants of the “Atlantic rim”—of the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. In particular we will explore how new identity creation enabled these peoples to imagine and enact not only the common bonds of civil society, but also the bondage of subjugation and slavery, and sometimes the opposition to that bondage.

As an interdisciplinary meeting organized by historians and literary scholars, our conference will attend equally to history and to story: that is, to issues of documentary evidence and to the creative models through which we read this evidence; to the events and to the tales that often shaped the events; and to continuing problems of narrative history and of literary historicism. To promote interdisciplinary connections more fully, we plan as much as possible to mix literary and historical papers in our concurrent sessions. We invite individual submissions and full panels dealing with identity and empire throughout the “Atlantic rim,” both in the Anglo-American, Iberian and Francophone worlds, and also among Africans and Native Americans.

The conference will be held in the beautiful new Elliott University Center, a state-of-the-art facility on the UNCG campus in the heart of Greensboro, an historic city which has witnessed the Revolutionary Battle of Guilford Courthouse in 1781, the collapse of the Confederate cabinet in 1865, and the birth of the Sit-In Movement in 1960.

We invite e-mail submissions. For papers, send a 250-word titled abstract; for a complete panel, send an overall title and individual 250-word titled abstracts for each paper. Please also include 1-page CV which includes e-mail and a regular mail addresses at which you can be reached during the spring and summer of 2004; and indicate any expected audio-visual needs (including special software needs).

Please send submissions to: Christopher Hodgkins and Karl Schleunes of the UNCG English and History Departments via email and visit our conference website. Due date for submissions: March 1, 2004

Some suggested paper and session topics:

• Race: Racial definition/redefinition and Atlantic geography
• Racial definition/redefinition through biology
• Free blacks in slave societies
• Comparative attitudes toward race and color throughout the Americas
• Free women of color in the Americas
• Religion: Religion and colonial racism
• Religious rationales for and religious critiques of empire
• Native religions and the response to European conquest
• Impact of religious confessions on personal and public identity
• Literature and Language: Myths of imperial inheritance and recovery
• Learning to Curse: Revisiting Greenblatt’s Caliban
• Greenblatt’s “self-fashioning” and colonial identity
• Literary historicisms, old and new
• Atrocity tales and colonial discourse
• Colonial settings and subtexts in the Eighteenth/Nineteenth Century novel
• Impact of print publication on personal and public identity
• Leading the explorer astray: Trickster tales and the land of gold
• George Herbert in America (UNCG houses one of the U.S.’s two largest rare Herbert archives)
• Gender: Renewing virility on the colonial frontier
• Marriage and miscegenation in the Atlantic World
• Redefining manhood/womanhood in the colonies
• Miscegenation and female identity
• Motherhood and slavery
• Female slave owners
• Class: The colonies and upward mobility
• Indenture, servitude, and slavery in the Atlantic World
• Science: Intersections of science and race
• Mapping native peoples
• Constructing categories: The scientific traveler
• Ecology and the Atlantic World
• Commerce: Impact of commerce on personal and public identity
• Competing models of commerce and empire
• The material cultures of empire
• Region and Nation: Empires of Liberty: Expansion in the name of freedom
• Nationalism for and against empire
• Imperialism and counter-imperialism: The scramble for empire
• Anti-imperialism in the Sixteenth/Seventeenth/Eighteenth/Nineteenth Century
• Performing empire: rites and rituals of power and resistance
• Impact of the Pacific on the Atlantic World
• Incorporating the borderlands
• Natural landscape and oral culture
• Interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinary benefits and discontents
• Archives: Historical and literary approaches
• Literature and History: programs, journals, conferences
• Pedagogy: Teaching about identity and empire in secondary schools and colleges
• Teaching about the Atlantic World in secondary schools and colleges
• Teaching across traditional geographical and chronological boundaries in secondary schools and colleges