CALL FOR PAPERS:

SPACE, RACE, AND SOCIAL CONTROL: IDEAL COMMUNITIES AND THE ‘FOREIGN’"

We seek abstracts for a proposed panel at the 2004 American Studies Association meeting in Atlanta, November 11-14, 2004. The topic we take up is the relationship between utopian or idealized spaces and the role of the foreigner/outsider in inciting/creating/shaping such imagined spaces. We are interested in applying the meeting theme, "The Crossroads of Culture," to community creation within national boundaries and through U.S. imperialism around the world. Immigration and imperialism are truly the "crossroads of cultures" by means of which normative "America" is created. Thus, American public health projects are equally a part of immigration reforms and U.S. imperialism -- what Nayan Shah calls "the imperial reach of American modernity." How do discourses of public health and U.S. imperialism work to control foreign bodies through the regulation of public spaces? How is it precisely through controlling the "problem" of trans-national mobility that such idealized spaces are possible at all? In other words, the process of dictating the "model" of living to which immigrants/colonized subjects must conform helps to codify ideas about American culture and the appropriate markers/measures of citizenship. We are concerned with the ways in which "the crossroads of culture" can be understood as the laboratory (the melting pot turned crucible) for new kinds of social control. Studies of all time periods and geographies are welcomed. We encourage inter-disciplinary approaches, especially work in/about architecture, geography and urban studies, history of science/medicine, sociology, and anthropology.

Please submit a one-page abstract and CV by email to Jolie Sheffer (via email) by January 5, 2004.