america adrift

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).

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.