Association of American Geographers, Annual Meeting
San Francisco, California, 17-21 April 2007
Second Call for Papers
Session: (Post)Colonial Subjects of American Imperialism
Organisers: Matthew Kurtz (Open University)
and Karen Morin (Bucknell University)
Discussant: Mona Domosh (Dartmouth College)
Sponsors: Geographic Perspectives on Women, Indigenous Peoples
Specialty Group, Historical Geography Specialty Group
Recent years have seen a burgeoning literature, in geography and other disciplines, about the contours of an American empire. Without denying its violent force, many scholars now start by querying whether the word "empire" best describes the nature of American influence overseas since the nineteenth century. Some are beginning to ask if America's capricious imperial formations were not enabled by the failure of existing concepts like "empire"or "globalization" to adequately assess the uneven powers through which resources, rights, and relationships were negotiated. Some suggest that such failures facilitated the exercise of subtle, new, intimate forms of colonial subjugation in the 20th century: subjection that was all the more effective because it was less readily called to account with our current vocabularies of "empire" and "imperialism."
That exercise has prompted some geographers to explore and refine alternative conceptual tools like "hegemony" and "informal imperialism." This is critically important work, yet it usually proceeds from the centers of American influence -- policy-makers, academic advisors, the press, corporate headquarters and marketing firms (in the United States) -- outward. It often stops shy of any detailed analysis of the grounded "colonial" negotiations in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and other sites where America's military, economic, and cultural powers reconfigured the dynamics of subjectivity and everyday life. In studies of European imperialism, that arena overseas was exactly where much postcolonial literature operated. Arguably, the personal and mundane social histories of American influence overseas -- like those explored in a recent edited volume, _Haunted by Empire_ (Stoler 2006) -- are poised to become the most productive sites in which the diverse contours of an American imperial formation can now be illuminated.
We seek papers that proceed from a historical-geographic, bottom-up approach to American empire. Like Stoler (2006), we hope to explore a range of "structured imperial predicaments by tracing them through the durabilities of duress in the subsoil of affective landscapes, in the weight of memory, in the maneuvers around the intimate management of people's lives." We invite theoretically informed, empirically rich papers that explore these "geographies of intimacy," the micro-geographies through which certain colonial subjects were constituted as not-quite-modern consumers or not-quite-free citizens under regimes of American influence which were, in turn, rarely acknowledged as "empire" by Americans in the states. To explore the dense processes of (post)colonial subject formation in a long American century, papers can examine particular topics from an array of possibilities such as: encounters with marriage law in late nineteenth century New Mexico; domestic arrangements in American Samoa in the early twentieth century; a Native boarding-school experience in mid-century Alaska; the organized resistance to rapes in Okinawa in the late twentieth century; and so on.
Should you be interested in presenting a paper in the session(s), please send an abstract to [log in to unmask] by Monday, 16th October 2006, or contact Matthew at that address if you have any questions.
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