america adrift

As you all must be aware, the great Paul Newman recently passed on. Katie McFarlane, a graduate student? at UEA has just joined the CM blog as their first contributer with a tribute to Mr. Newman, News: Remembering Paul Newman. Drop by and visit our friends across the North Sea “little pond.” They’re just a click away.

Banned Books Week is the only national celebration of the freedom to read. It was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. More than a thousand books have been challenged since 1982. The challenges have occurred in every state and in hundreds of communities. People challenge books that they say are too sexual or too violent. They object to profanity and slang, and protest against offensive portrayals of racial or religious groups–or positive portrayals of homosexuals. Their targets range from books that explore the latest problems to classic and beloved works of American literature.

Number 5 on the top 10 list:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

See Nicole Belle’s write-up here. As always, the C&L community produces a lively comment thread.

LATINO/A USA: TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITIES / IDENTIDADES TRANSNACIONALES

Seminar at University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

Friday-Saturday, November 14-15, 2008

We are inviting 30-minute presentations addressing any aspect of the interdisciplinary field of Latino/a studies. We welcome traditional research papers as well as methodological considerations from multiple disciplinary, theoretical, historical, and geographic perspectives.

All proposals are welcome, but we are particularly interested in research papers that focus on transnational identities and fall within one or several of the following areas:

• Economic, social, and cultural relationships between Latin American and US Latino/a communities

• Social, political, and cultural interactions of Latino/as with other ethnic and racial groups in the US and in between different Latino/a groups in the US

• Cultural and artistic representations of Latino/a experiences

• Political mobilization of Latino/as in the US

Please email max 400-word proposals as Word attachment, together with one-page CVs, to Dr. Anne Magnussen, magnussen@hist.sdu.dk

by September 15, 2008.

Successful participants will be notified of acceptance via email by October 1, 2008.

We accept papers and presentations in both English and Spanish.

Selected seminar presentations will be published as part of a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Dialogos latinoamericanos in 2009.

This seminar is part of a series of activities organized by “Latinos: Migration and Transnationalism in USA,” a network funded by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities. The network is a collaborative project between researchers from the University of Aarhus (Ken Henriksen), Copenhagen Business School (Jan Gustafsson, Helene Balslev Clausen), and the University of Southern Denmark (Benita Heiskanen, Anne Magnussen).

aspeers: emerging voices in american studies
calls for submissions by 31 October 2008

American Studies has always been interested in different notions of migration. Publications and course catalogs around the world testify to the role it has played and continues to play in both scholarly research and academic teaching. Recent concepts of ‘mobility’ can contribute to a new and richer understanding of the movement of people. Thus, we are calling for submissions scrutinizing migration and mobility, their relation to cultures and identities, and the narratives, fictions, and plots they generate. We invite contributors to engage areas such as old and new groups of migrants, the various directions and scopes of ‘mobility,’ different spaces of migration, or any other theme relating to the topic. Click here for more information.

This was part of the email I received from the aspeers team. I’ll add that a recent thesis might also be applicable.

Please help us get the word out on the CfPs. The editorial timetable is tight (as always) and we need to reach people fast. Also, with a lot of students writing term papers in August and September, reaching a large audience quickly is even more important to us. Who knows, maybe your fellow students are writing on “migration and mobility” anyways and find that–with just a little tweaking–they can get course credits for their paper and a publication with aspeers out of just one text…

I’ve just upgraded Wordpress, again. There’s been some problems with the comments so please bear with us. I know that David for example left a comment which was waiting moderation. Now it has disappeared. Sorry David.

I’ve installed the Askimet spam blocking plugin so hopefully all the spam showing up in the comments will be removed. There was over 100 “comments” from jewelry designers appearing on a post from over a year ago about a John Waters interview on NPR. Very bizarre stuff.

I’m trying to figure out how any non-spammers can just leave comments without having to wait for moderation. Anyone have any ideas. I don’t have the time to moderate comments nor do I think its conductive to open blog style discussions.

Thanks for your patience.

I just received a pre-notification on a cfp for an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.

The organisers are Burroughs and Beat Gen. scholar Oliver Harris, in partnership with fellow-Burroughsian - see for instance Reality Studio - Ian MacFadyen (they are also co-editing the book, Naked Lunch@50), and with Andrew Hussey, Dean of the University of London Institute in Paris.

The organizers promise that the event website will be developed shortly, but you can already take a sneak peek here.

The following four streams will organize the discussions:

We welcome proposals that range from short papers (15 minutes) to longer talks (30 minutes), from multi-media presentations to panel discussions and open mic debates. In English and in French, we are looking for original and innovative contributions from scholars and Burroughsians under the headings: The Untold Naked Lunch / A Post-Colonial Lunch / Naked Paris / Naked Lunch Now.

I hope a lot of scholars will gather in Paris next July to discuss and celebrate this extraordinary novel.

You are free to download and distribute the flyer for the Symposium. (PDF, 324 kb)

An increasingly hot topic in literary studies and in the area studies fields, such as American Studies is the relationship between writing, place, identity and belonging. Evidence of this agenda getting more and more important can, for instance, be found in the proposed topics for conferences and seminars worldwide. In Denmark the next big Am. Studies event, the Nordic Assosciation for American Studies‘ biannual conference, has as its theme Cosmospolitanism. Among the many questions the conference invites us to contemplate is the following: Continue Reading »

Robert Hariman and John Lucaites recently posted the one year anniversary of their fantastic blog, No Caption Needed.

You can read Bent’s review of both the blog and their seminal book by the same title here.

They’re experiencing some “growing pains”, something we are familiar with here.

It’s been a year since we began this blog. We had no idea what we were getting into. The initial idea was to put up an ad for the book. Not a great idea, but then we thought that we could write a few posts to thicken the ad. After all, neither one of us had the time to do this on a regular basis. One thing lead to another, and soon we had created a monster: we loved writing the posts and seeing the audience grow, but we still didn’t have the time, so we told ourselves that we’d do it for a year and then quit. It’s been a year and we don’t want to quit, but we need to make some changes.

I encourage you to stop by and leave your comments or drop them an email, or better yet both. This is one of the little jewels out in the academic blogosphere (and a service to the public at large). Both blog and book have been a source of inspiration for me personally as I have become increasingly drawn into visual culture, semiotics and that emerging niche that Bent refers to as iconicity studies.

Best of luck and continued success with No Caption Needed.

By Professor David Roediger,

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Center for American Studies

University of Southern Denmark, Odense

Thursday, September 25, 2008

14:15-16:00, Room 100

This lecture, based on David Roediger’s shortly forthcoming How Race Survived United States History (Verso), sets the historic presidential candidacy of Barack Obama within longer patterns of white supremacy in the U. S. past. It argues that the successes of Obama’s candidacy register important, though contradictory, changes in racial attitudes in the post-1965 U.S. At the same time, the “Obama Phenomenon” also obscures the extent to which the structural factors leading to race-thinking persist and raises critical questions regarding the political challenges of moving past a view of race predicated on the simple dualism of black and white.

Professor Roediger teaches history and African American Studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His books include Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Become White (New York: Basic Books, 2005); Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Class, and Politics (London and New York: Verso Books, 1994); and The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Rev. ed. London and New York: Verso Books, 1999).

All Welcome!

For further information, please contact Dr. Benita Heiskanen, Center for American Studies, SDU-Odense, email benita@hist.sdu.dk, tel. +45-6550 3133.

NPR.org, June 2, 2008 - One of the fathers of rock ‘n’ roll died Monday at the age of 79. Bo Diddley was born Ellas Bates in Mississippi and grew up in Chicago, where he played guitar on street corners before being discovered by Chess Records. He leaves behind a sound that helped build a musical movement.

What made Bo’s music so unique? I don’t know exactly but if I had to assign to it just one adjective it would be, crunchy. Yeah, what a wonderful crunchy sound.