Call For Papers: Latent Destiny, Manifest ReversalDimensions of Political Ecology 2014: Conference on Nature/Society (
www.politicalecology.org)
February 27-March 1, 2014; University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY
Session organizers: Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, UC Berkeley, July Cole, independent scholar
“Other nations have tried to check ... the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the Continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”
—John O'Sullivan (1813-1895), U.S. Magazine & Democratic Review, July 1845
Manifest Destiny is the major phenomenon unleashed on the heels of Lewis and Clark, Wilkes, Gibbons, Stevens, and other U.S. expeditions (e.g. Herndon and Gibbon 1853, Jackson 1978, Stevens 1855, Tyler 1968). This Destiny is generally identified with westward and outward movement, divine favor, white supremacy, resource exploitation, and insistently policed boundaries. O’Sullivan might have coined the phrase, but the tendency can be traced at least as far back as Jefferson’s 1803 directives to Lewis and Clark (Jackson 1978). World Bank and IMF policies have exported Manifest Destiny’s physical and political/economic infrastructures world-wide (D’Souza 2008, Woelfle-Erskine et al. 2007). Contemporary global military U.S. missions echo frontier settlement patterns: rogue deployment, swarm tactics, establishment of corridors, etc. An overturning of Manifest Destiny—a Manifest Reversal!—appears to us increasingly urgent, inevitable, and desired.
One of Manifest Destiny’s prime characteristics is its assumption of hegemony. Oral histories and folk literatures and suppressed accounts are rife with narratives of how, under Manifest Destiny, humans have been variously recruited, chased, displaced, imported, abandoned, enslaved, shot, employed, deployed, corralled, rewarded, experimented on, and over-written (Conway 1995, Davis 2002, Scott 1993, Kosek 2006). These manipulations occur at the demand of the logics of U.S. national expansionism and consolidation, and render those logics over-determined and nearly self-perpetuating. Yet, despite the cathedral assurance Manifest Destiny radiates, it has met continued, vigorous, and multi-faceted resistance from the moment of its inception to the present hour. The first and foremost of Manifest Destiny’s opponents, its fiercest critics and most clairvoyant refuseniks, are Native American and other indigenous people (Deloria 1988, Howe and TallBear 2006, Mooney 1965, TallBear 2013, Wilkinson 2005 and 2006, Weir 2009). All versions of Manifest Reversal operate in parallel with and are crucially indebted to these bright cohorts.
We have settled on the unsettling etymological interpretation of “manifest” (probable roots manus "hand" + -festus "struck") as “accomplished by a seize or strike of a hand” (like a black eye) in the early stages of Manifest Destiny, through mid-stage “manifest” as “to spread by public declaration”, morphing at last into “manifest” as “caught in the act” (Cole 2010). Just as in psychoanalysis, manifest content is not latent content (Freud 1917), and as in sociology, manifest function is not latent function (Merton 1967)—and as latent counterparts to the manifest are by definition unanticipated, often unrecognized, and in parts opposite in their tendencies—so also must Manifest Destiny trail many a latent destiny, shadows it is blind to but never free of.
This interdisciplinary session explores the ways in which these latent destinies can be seized by different hands. In what ways can the elusive, contrary latent can be caught in its own different act? Where can we stand to kick off a Manifest Reversal?
Approaches useful in proposals for this session include empirical, analytical, perceptual, performative, and conceptual; rigorous mixed approaches are welcome. We especially welcome studies within Manifest Destiny’ original geographic expanse (U.S. states, territories, and border regions). Questions of relevance range from the historic, through natural and social sciences, into strategic and prophetic realms:
• What strikes/seizures have become “naturalized” in common perception (river forms, cattle grazing etc)?
• Which forms and tools of Manifest Destiny are gaining prevalence? losing prevalence? in which conditions?
• How do projects of natural resource protection works the detriment, criminalization, or invisibility of different peoples?
• How are latent destinies caught: as the flu can be caught or perhaps as the wind can be caught or perhaps as a glimpse can be caught or perhaps as a fish can be caught?
• What “territories” or “terrains” remained unclaimed by Manifest Destiny? How would a Reversal converse with them?
Possible themes for presentation in this session might be:
· Identifying and tracking one set of legacies or permutations of Manifest Destiny as they crack up, re-circulate, and/or re-precipitate
· Accounts of Manifest Reversal oracles, and transcripts of their pronouncements
· Biomimicry as a staging ground or incubator for Manifest Reversal technologies
· Recovery of latencies trailed by early stage Manifestations (e.g. wholesale bison massacres, propagation of typhoid in Native communities via infected cloth, the Philadelphia MOVE bombing, the Sand Creek Massacre, the atomic bombing of Japan)
· Sites of paradox and collapse in the mid-stage Manifestations exemplified by the cementing of slogans into “solid” mirages, e.g. Hoover Dam and the Mississippi River levees from “Rain follows the plow”(Wilber 1881: 143); BIA Termination policies from “The savage must ever recede before the man of civilization”(Lepner 1837: 103))
· Late stage Manifestations, riddled with Latencies—as documented in the post-colonial and indigenous science fiction of recent decades (e.g. Silko, Jones, Hausman, Dillon)
· Latent re-inventions of humans’ ecological positions (especially in collaboration with beaver and/or other ecosystem engineers)
Please submit 250 word abstracts by November 15 to the session organizers: Cleo Woelfle-Erskine (
[log in to unmask]) and July Cole (
[log in to unmask]). Accepted papers will be notified no later than November 25, 2013.
All presenters must register online and pay the conference fee ($20 for graduate students; $40 for faculty; $0 for undergraduates) by December 2. Conference registration opens on October 1, 2013. Please visit the website to register.
Bibliography
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D’Souza, Rohan. 2008. “Framing India’s Hydraulic Crises.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine 60 (3) (August 7): 112.
Davis, Mike. 2002. Dead Cities and Other Tales: a Natural History. New York: New Press.
Deloria, Vine. 1988. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
———. 1997. Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact. Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum Pub.
Dillon, Grace L. 2012. Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
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Wilber, C. D. (Charles Dana). 1881. The Great Valleys and Prairies of Nebraska and the Northwest. Omaha : Daily Republican Print.
http://archive.org/details/cu31924083881155.
Wilkinson, Charles F. 2005. Messages from Franks Landing: a Story of Salmon, Treaties, and the Indian Way. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
———. 2006. Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations. New York: Norton.
Woelfle-Erskine, Cleo, July Oskar Cole, Laura Allen, and Annie Danger. 2007. Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground. illustrated edition. Soft Skull Press.