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> *Call For Papers: Latent Destiny, Manifest Reversal*
> Dimensions 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 25 *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
>
> Cole, July Oskar. 2010. “Wash Out : Fluvial Forms and Processes on the
> American Frontiers”. M.S., Missoula: University of Montana.
> Conway, Cecelia. 1995. African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: a Study of Folk
> Traditions. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
> 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.
> Freud, Sigmund. 1977. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. W. W.
> Norton & Company.
> Hausman, Blake M. 2011. Riding the Trail of Tears. Lincoln: University of
> Nebraska Press.
> Herndon, William Lewis, and Lardner Gibbon. 1853. Exploration of the
> Valley of the Amazon: Made Under Direction of the Navy Department. R.
> Armstrong [etc.] public printer.
> Howe, Craig Phillip, Kimberly TallBear, and Oak Lake Writers’ Society.
> 2006. This Stretch of the River. [South Dakota]: Oak Lake Writers’ Society.
> Jackson, Donald Dean. 1978. Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
> Volume 1 Volume 1. Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois press.
> Jones, Stephen Graham. 2008. Ledfeather. Tuscaloosa: FC2.
> http://public.eblib.com/EBLPublic/PublicView.do?ptiID=454560.
> Kosek, Jake. 2006. Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern
> New Mexico. Duke University Press.
> Krupar, Shiloh R. 2013. Hot Spotter’s Report: Military Fables of Toxic
> Waste.
> Mehan, Uppinder, and Nalo Hopkinson. 2004. So Long Been Dreaming:
> Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press.
> Merton, Robert K. 1957. Social Theory and Social Structure (Rev. Ed.).
> Vol. xviii. New York,  NY,  US: Free Press.
> Mooney, James. 1965. The Ghost-dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of
> 1890. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
> Scott, John Anthony. 1983. The Ballad of America: The History of the
> United States in Song and Story. Carbondale, [Ill.]: Southern Illinois
> University Press.
> Silko, Leslie Marmon. 1992. Almanac of the Dead: a Novel. New York, NY
> [u.a.: Penguin Books.
> Southern Literary Messenger. 1837. T.W. White.
> Stevens, Isaac Ingalls. 1860. Narrative and Final Report of Explorations
> for a Route for a Pacific Railroad, Near the Forty-seventh and Forty-ninth
> Parallels of North Latitude: From St. Paul to Puget Sound, 1855. T.H. Ford.
> TallBear, Kimberly. 2013. Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the
> False Promise of Genetic Science.
> Tyler, David B., and drawings and paintings (including frontispiece).
> 1968. The Wilkes Expedition: The First United States Exploring Expedition
> (1838 - 1842). First Edition, First Printing edition. American
> Philosophical Society.
> Weir, Jessica K. 2009. Murray River Country an Ecological Dialogue with
> Traditional Owners. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.
> http://site.ebrary.com/id/10424592.
> 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.
>
>