Papers are invited for the Interdisciplinary Approaches to Culture and Society Discussion Group panel on “Diasporic ‘America’: Dislocating the Nation” scheduled for the 2004 Modern Language Association convention in Philadelphia.

Definitions of what is “American” have often been imagined to provide cultural authority for the nation-state of the USA. This panel seeks to dislocate this nationalizing formation by presenting alternative insights into the cultural work of “Americanness.” How do the meanings of “American” expressions, performances, productions, formations, or artifacts become defamiliarized as they circulate in global situations outside the jurisdiction of the United States? How does the varied constitutions of “Americanness” articulate different possibilities—ranging from the critical to the celebratory to the colonial—as they are diffracted beyond (or beneath) the boundaries of the nation? The panel also welcomes papers that examine how considerations of what is “American” are adapted or invented to perform symbolic labor for indigenous groups, immigrant communities, and counternational elements inside the United States or within the greater “Americas.”

Please send 250 proposal and one-page CV.