The Canadian Association for American Studies is pleased to announce four CAAS- sponsored Panels at the next American Studies Association meeting, Toronto, October 8-11, 2015

The theme of the 2015 annual ASA meeting is The (Re)production of Misery and the Ways of Resistance.

Full information can be found here:

http://www.theasa.net/annual_meeting/

American Realisms and the Pursuit of Unhappiness

This is one of four panels that the ASA has invited the Canadian Association of American Studies to coordinate.

Amid resurgent aesthetic and philosophical debates about diverse postmodern realisms, the theme of misery offers an occasion to reassess the traditionally vexed question of the realist’s attitude towards desired outcomes: happiness, fulfillment, success.  To what extent has the aesthetic (e.g. artistic, cinematic, photographic, literary) and/or critical (e.g. philosophical, sociological, psychological, political) American realist continued to figure, in the words of Henry James, “as a sort of meddlesome doctor who forbids agreeable aftertastes”? What specific naïve, optimistic, idealistic, utopian, or otherwise “happy” scenarios have such realists problematized, relativized, entertained, or refused to entertain–and to what effect?  In terms of historical scope and (inter-) disciplinary range, this panel aspires to be broad;  proposals pertaining to “Classic,” Modern, and Contemporary Realisms, hyphenated or otherwise, are all welcome. Up to 250 words (1 page) proposals with short CVs to luke.bresky@stmu.ca by January 26, 2015.

“Wildcat Currencies: America’s Alternative Economies”

Organizer: Ross Bullen (OCAD University, Toronto, ON, Canada)

Email: rbullen@faculty.ocadu.ca

This is one of four panels that the ASA has invited the Canadian Association of American Studies to coordinate.

In his 2014 book Wildcat Currency: How the Virtual Money Revolution is Transforming the Economy, Edward Castronova argues that decentralized digital currencies like BitCoin represent less a break from a conventional understanding of what money is, than a continuation of a long tradition of “wildcat currencies” that circulate outside, or alongside, the mainstream American economy. Such currencies complicate the distinction between “real” and “imaginary” (or “virtual”) money, and indeed cause us to ask whether such distinctions are, or ever have been, possible. Moreover, wildcat currencies have offered an important alternative for those who – for whatever reason – do not benefit from, of have access to, centralized banking systems. This panel seeks papers that consider the U.S. economy as a site that produces and reproduces structural inequalities and miseries, and explore how various groups of people in the U.S. have resisted an economy that does not benefit them by creating their own currencies, banks, systems of exchange, and transfers of value. Papers from all fields (including, of course, fictional representations of wildcat currencies) and historical periods are welcome. Possible topics could include “general” and “restricted” economies; African American banking; “money clubs” (like ggeh); IVTS (informal value transfer systems) like hawala; Confederate money; antebellum wildcat banking; digital currencies (like BitCoin); money in video games and other virtual environments; U.S. gift economies. This panel is sponsored by the Canadian Association for American Studies. Up to 250 words (1 page) proposals with short CVs by January 26 to Ross Bullen, rbullen@faculty.ocadu.ca by January 26, 2015.

Stand Your Ground: Incarcerations, Lynchings, and Executions

CFP for CAAS sponsored panel at ASA

Organizer: Percy Walton (Carleton University)

Percy_walton@carleton.ca

This is one of four panels that the ASA has invited the Canadian Association of American Studies to coordinate.

With 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. comprises 25% of the world’s prison population, or 724 prisoners per 100,000 people (Pleases, Vicky, BBC News, March 8, 2013); it is not surprising, therefore, that many American Studies scholars see the U.S. as a police state. In addition, the “Stand Your Ground” laws, in one form or another, have been implemented in 46 states. Since the perpetrators under these “self-defence rulings” tend to be White men, and the victims young black men, Stand Your Ground laws, in effect, allow for a new form of lynching. The U.S., of course, is also the only developed country in the world (with the exception of Japan), that still retains the death penalty, or, what David Garland calls: “America’s peculiar institution” (playing on the title of Kenneth M. Stampp’s 1956 book on slavery). This panel invites papers that explore the state of the U.S. prison system, prison writings, executions, and Stand your Ground laws, in any literary genre, in the hope of coming to some understanding of the social, cultural, and racial dynamics of discipline and punishment in the U.S.

This panel is sponsored by the Canadian Association for American Studies. Up to 250 words (1 page) proposals with short CVs to Percy Walton (percy_walton@carleton.ca) by January 26, 2015.

Free Market Fictions

Organizer: Geordie Miller (Dalhousie University)

This is one of four panels that the ASA has invited the Canadian Association of American Studies to coordinate.

Can fictional works estrange us from the free market life-world we inhabit? How do they resist, repurpose, or reflect the capitalist social relations that shape this life-world? Our panel invites papers that develop a response to these questions and their critical assumptions. Potential allies or antagonists in the American intellectual field include (but are not limited to) Frederic Jameson, Michael Clune, and Walter Benn Michaels. Are we still under the ideological spell of market fascination, which Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism traces to popular attitudes about the market that emerged in the wake of World War II? Do specific genres, like the novel, augur an “aesthetic transformation of the economic” (Clune)? Or are contemporary novels symptomatic of the political logic that sanctions the free market (Michaels)? Should fiction and cultural criticism be more free from economic questions and concerns? Or is such freedom a miserable goal?

Possible topics may include:

The free market as fiction

Works of art versus art commodities

Marxist sociology of literature

“Financial fiction” (La Berge)

Literary industries/labor

An aesthetics of Wall Street

“Capitalist realism” (Schudson, Fisher)

Austerity and allegory

Up to 250 words (1 page) proposals with short CVs to: geordie.miller@gmail.com by January 26, 2015.