Inviting proposals for panel examining frontier discourses in US American culture and politics, including their historically shifting meanings, referents, and deployments. This could include considerations of:
· how different geographies and environments come to be labeled frontiers over the course of US history
· how a frontier imaginary is mobilized in political discourse, including social movements
· how a transnational or comparative approach resituates nation-based or American exceptionalist narratives of the frontier
· the role of frontier discourses in national identity, colonial projects, or international relations
· how work, race and ethnicity, and nationality are gendered in frontier discourse
· how frontier imaginaries shape our own disciplinary fields, knowledge production, and objects of study
This list is intentionally broad, as a starting point to finding complementary papers. The ideal panel would bring together scholars with specialties in gender, labor, social movements, culture, empire, and U.S. in the world or the transnational.
The American Studies Association meeting is in San Juan, Puerto Rico in November 2012. The theme of the meeting is "Dimensions of Empire and Resistance: Past, Present, and Future."
Please submit a 250 word abstract and CV to georgia.welch@duke.edu by December 31, 2011.
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