If ever there was a time when most scholars agreed on the meaning of “America” as an object of study, that era has been replaced by a contemporary array of critical questions about place, history, sovereignty, discourse, power, politics, and identity. While not completely passe, definitions of “America” as a neatly bounded, manifestly destined nation (on a continent of the same name) founded by European adventurers with a love of democracy are now outmoded. Indeed, thanks to new frameworks such as borderlands studies, indigenous studies, “Americas” studies, and postcolonial studies of the U.S., along with theoretical upheavals in categorical conceptions of identity, nation, and culture through, for example, performance studies, queer theory, critical race theory, and feminist theory, it is clear that notions of jazz as “a quintessentially American art form” are insufficient.

Inspired by an interdisciplinary conference jointly sponsored by the American Theatre and Drama Society and the University of Kansas called “Writing, Teaching, Performing America,” with which we hope to encourage cross-conference participation, and which takes place at KU on March 3-5, 2005, this year's theme is “Improvising America.”

The second annual KU Jazz Studies Colloquium assumes that “America” is not a stable category, but rather a contested, changing, improvised one, and that jazz is one of the dynamic performative practices through which these constitutive improvisations have taken and continue to take place. We are less interested in jazz as "American,” than we are in how jazz musicians improvise “Americanness,” or against “Americanness.”

How have jazz artists improvised Africanness in America and Americanness outside America? How do jazz musicians, audiences, critics, improvise on and against claims of jazz as “beyond nation,” “multicultural” or "universal"? What are the implications of "nation" in improvising blackness; how has jazz participated in improvising African-Americanness, Afro-Caribbeanness, Afro-Latinidad, Pan-Africanness? How is it possible that jazz has been selected by the State Department as national symbol, at the same time that it has been used to protest dominant U.S. nationalism, and re-envisioned democracy? Why has jazz been useful for improvising diverse coalitional community identities, such as Asian Americanness? Does jazz always “improvise America” when it travels (when it has been and is played in Canada, in Mexico, in Cuba, in France, in the interwar years, for instance?) Does jazz continue to “improvise America” today?

POSSIBLE THEMES INCLUDE:

Performance practices that improvise on, or against, ideas about America

Jazz performance as improvising survival in America

Jazz as a process for struggling over what is "America" and who are Americans

Jazz performances of Americanness abroad (State Department tours, for example) or in the U.S. (jazz in the White House)

How various people become "American” (or particular kinds of Americans) through jazz

Expatriots and jazz

Jazz and nationalism/s (black nationalism, “America’s classical music,” etc.)

Questions of whether jazz is American, African-American, global, etc.

"Improvising Americas" such as the interactively influential relationships between Latin American music and jazz

Jazz in Canada

Jazz and urbanization and industrialization; jazz and the Great Migration

Native Americans and jazz

Transnational improvisations, Pan-African improvisations

Jazz and/as/in American culture

Improvising global peace movements
The Colloquium is held in conjunction with the 28th KU Jazz Festival (with confirmed festival appearances by Jane Ira Bloom’s “Chasing Paint Project,” Ingrid Jensen’s “Project ‘O’” and Peter Erskine) and "Writing, Teaching, Performing America," an interdisciplinary conferencesponsored by The American Theatre and Drama Society and the University of Kansas (both March 3-5, 2005)

“Improvising America” is the second annual Interdisciplinary Jazz Studies Colloquium organized by the KU Interdisciplinary Jazz Studies Group

DEADLINE: NOVEMBER 30, 2004

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