Replications: Performing and Re-staging America at Home and Abroad

This seminar explores the notion of replication in culture and the persistent role "American" plays as producing agent in deploying spectacles of sameness. The focus of our inquiry pursues the influence of replicated experience on public perceptions, as well as how “consumer-friendly” fields of cultural signage are repeated worldwide. Our interest is in looking not just at the influence and extent of what is American in the twenty-first century, but also at the increasing attention to be paid to constructs or critiques of the American in earlier eras and in other New World locations, whether in the Caribbean, in South or Central America, Canada, or Mexico.

We conceive the seminar as a launch point for on-going inquiry among conference attendees. We seek a range of perspectives that investigate the American project as stage (or staging) of cultural replication worldwide. Interdisciplinary approaches to the subject are especially welcome. Possible points of investigation include but are not limited to:

How is America perceived and how has that perception changed over time.
What is the price for being Americanized?
What is its appeal?
What does it give and what does it take away, what does it satisfy?
Can the American agenda be considered a giant step toward or a retreat from the destination of a more just global future?
How would the optimum global economy best be described, achieved?
What happens to resistant practices within global replication?
How does cultural replication affect distinct traditions?

Submissions: Deadline 20 January 2008
We ask seminar participants to send a 500-word abstract, institutional affiliation, brief bio (max.100 words), and contact information to seminar co-leaders.

Seminar Format:
Selected participants will each submit a 10-12 page paper by 3 April 2008. Participants will be paired prior to the conference for on-line discussion. Co-leaders plan to engage participants and audience in critical dialogue toward creating a framework of major themes and areas for future development.