Call for Papers | SASA 2009
Beginnings and Renewals: Locating American Studies

The 2009 biennial meeting of the Southern American Studies Association will be held on the campus of George Mason University in the heart of northern Virginia, a longstanding yet ever-changing site of transatlantic, multiethnic, colonial, urban, and cosmopolitan American beginnings and renewals. About fifteen miles from downtown Washington, DC, and within a few miles of Arlington, Mount Vernon, the Pentagon, Old Town Alexandria, and much more, northern Virginia is a place where the "old" and the "new" continue to meet and reinvent each other.

The Washington, DC, metropolitan area is famous for its many iconic, monumental fashionings of U.S. national identity and cultural memory. But this is of course also a region of tremendous fluidity, a place full of surprises and crisscrossed by routes of trade, labor, government, law, media, languages, cultures that continue to be negotiated, constructed, mapped, traveled, toured, enforced, and contested. SASA 2009 offers us an opportunity to consider how these and other networks provoke both connections and disconnections among the local, the federal, the regional, the national, the hemispheric, and the global. We'll also investigate how routes and roots help us understand beginnings and renewals and help us undertake the work of locating American studies in place, space, and time.

We invite our colleagues in American Studies, Southern Studies, and all related fields of study and areas of interest to join us as we investigate these and other ways of locating American Studies. While we welcome proposals addressing the conference theme and are always happy to consider proposals investigating the South, broadly defined, this conference is open to anyone interested in contributing to the interdisciplinary study of American cultures.

Possible topics for session and individual paper proposals include (but are not limited to):

• American Indian roots and routes
• Colonial and/or other "beginnings"
• Urban and/or other "renewals"
• New iterations of American Studies
• Formations and deformations of American communities/neighborhoods
• Growth, sprawl, development, reclamation: cities, suburbs, exurbs, industries
• Waterways and waterfronts; ports and maritime culture
• Transatlantic/colonial encounters on the Eastern seaboard
• Early African American history and culture
• Geographics and natural history
• Representing and contesting slavery
• Travel and tourism, domestic and international, then and now
• Contested representations of American Indians
• Public cultures
• Forms of material culture
• Ethnic and multiethnic beginnings, renewals, and/or locations
• Memory, commemoration, amnesia
• Secrets, disguises, covert identities
• Museums and/or monuments
• Animals/Animal Rights
• Music and musicology
• Ethnic enclaves in the South, the mid-Atlantic, and/or the U.S.
• Film and media studies
• Cultural traumas and contested histories
• Performances, theatrical representations, festivals, public spectacles
• Photography and national memory/identity
• Politics, government, public affairs
• Literatures of beginnings and renewals
• Transatlantic or transnational literary and cultural relations
• Teaching the roots and routes of New Southern Studies
• Teaching American Studies in various contexts, settings, etc.
• Remaking Native American identities and communities
• Borderlands in the South
• Contesting notions of region and/or regionalism
• Writing/working against the slave trade
• Disrupting antebellum/postbellum or other historical/cultural paradigms
• Law and American Studies
• Locating American Studies in various institutional and other settings
• Americans/America/American studies abroad
• Postcolonial Theory and U.S. federal law, government, foreign policy, etc.
• ASA 2008 follow-ups on "Integrative American Studies in Theory and Practice"