ASA Program Book
Sessions at a Glance
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2008
7:30 am – 9:00 am
Graduate Programs in American Studies: Present and Future (Directors' Breakfast Workshop)...99
8:00 am – 9:30 am
American Studies Editorial Board Meeting...99
8:00 am – 3:00 pm
ASA National Council Business Meeting...99
9:30 am – 11:00 am
Changing the Culture: Tenure and Promotion Policy for the Engaged University...99
10:00 am – 11:30 am
Women's Committee Business Meeting ...100
Business Meeting of the Minority Scholars' Committee ...100
10:00 am – 11:45 am
Queering Modernist Regionalism: Taos, Santa Fe, and Seattle...100
Global Circulation of Images: Middle East Meets West in U.S. Motion Pictures...100
Faith Activity: Case Studies in Religious Activism...101
Listening to the Land: At the Crossroads of Ecofeminism, Transnationalism, and Native American Studies...101
Theorizing Race and Performance in Colonial Contexts...102
Evolutionary Empires, Unstable Identities: Circum-Atlantic Darwinism and the Colonial Imagination...102
American Studies Outside the Academy: Workshop (Sponsored by the ASA Students' Committee)...103
Pragmatism, Ethics, and Democracy: Self and Other Down at the Crossroads...103
The Politics of Relation: Creolization and the Invention of America...104
Crossroads in New Orleans: Storytelling and Counterhegemonic Geographies in Pre- and Post-Katrina New Orleans...104
Expansions of War: National Security, Transnational Internment, and Racial Disciplines...105
Bowling Across Boundaries: An American Leisure Activity Revisited...105
King of the Crossroads: Theorizing the Art and Impact of Jean-Michel Basquiat...106
Ecocriticism from Melville to Yamashita...106
Race, Identity, and Educational Politics...106
12:00 pm – 1:45 pm
Law and Cultural Studies: Understanding Asian/American and Latino/a Racial and Gendered Subjects across Spatialities...107
Histories of the Dust Heap: Waste, Material Cultures, Social Justice...107
Sites and Transits: Indigenous and Indigenized Environmental Ethics and Poetics...108
Feminist Subjects in "America": Violence, Recognition, and Citizenship...108
Looking for Home in Unexpected Places: James Baldwin and the Politics of Return...109
American Labor: Invisibility in National, Transnational, and Colonial Contexts (Sponsored by LAWCHA and the Working Class Studies Caucus)...109
Race, Sex, and Science at the Crossroads: Synthetic Personhood in Visual Popular Culture...110
TA to Tenure: Rethinking Academic Labor and Unionization (Sponsored by the Students' Committee)...110
Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, and Technologies of Control...110
The Power of Mobility? Cultural Intersections, Identity, and Travel...111
National Identities, Transnational Figures...111
Three Ways of Looking at Bodies...112
Circulating Scandal in Antebellum Periodicals...112
Theory Meets Practice: "American Sabor: U.S. Latinos in Popular Music" and the Possibilities of Public Scholarship in the Museum Context...113
Black Native Race/Identity from the Eighteenth Century to the Twentieth...113
12:00 pm – 2:00 pm
International Partnership Lunch ...114
1:30 pm – 5:00 pm
Regional Chapters Committee Meeting ...114
2:00 pm – 3:45 pm
Genre Discontinuities: Allegorizing the Vietnam War in American Television and Film...114
The Western Frontier as International Metaphor: Mapping Morphing Cultural Boundaries since 1945...115
Where Is "America" in Transnational American Studies?...115
Thinking with W. E. B. Du Bois at the Crossroads of Theory and Practice...115
Theories in American Studies I: Sex...116
Mexican Americans and Whiteness...116
Homeland, Heartland: Creating and Remembering People and Place...117
Thinking Race at Its Limits: The Future of the Past...117
Self-Locating in Academe and Activism: Identity Politics at the Crossroads...117
Regionalists on the Left: Radical Voices and Regional Diversity in the 1930s...118
Sexuality, Nationality, Indigeneity: Intersections of Native American and Queer Studies...118
Rereading American Studies Origins...119
The Animal Nature of Human Social Relations...119
9/11 Vernaculars...119
American Indian Literature: Readings by Diane Glancy and Laura Tohe...120
2:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Business Meeting of the Students' Committee ...120
3:30 pm – 5:30 pm
Business Meeting of the American Quarterly Advisory Editorial Board ...120
4:00 pm – 5:45 pm
Imperial Formations and Manifest Destinies: Israel/Palestine and Circuits of Exceptionality...120
Not in Isolation: Solidarity, Responsibility, and Sacrifice throughout the U.S. Southwest, 1900–2007...121
Alternative Suburban Geographies...121
Rethinking Global Hollywood: Old Myths and New Realities...122
Scandalous Selves: Properties of Early Black Personhood...122
Bodies and Spirits: Reconsidering the American Occult...123
Theorizing Native Studies...123
International Committee Talkshop I: Obtaining Resources to Teach American Studies Internationally...124
Humor at the Crossroads of Ethnicity, Race, and Immigration...124
Going Mobile: Global Flows of Media and the American Experience with Portable Technology (Sponsored by the Science and Technology Caucus)...124
Bodies without Borders: Intimate Knowledges, Public Embodiments, and the Trans-Global–American Crossroads...125
Keywords in the Study of Environment and Culture (Sponsored by the Environment and Culture Caucus)...125
American Antipodes: Transnational Culture/National Identity in Australia and New Zealand...126
Global Axes of American Studies...126
The Transnational West...127
Writers and Migrancy...127
5:00 pm – 9:00 pm
American Studies Association Welcome Reception...128
6:00 pm – 11:00 pm
Business Meeting of the ASA Nominating Committee ...128
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2008
7:30 am – 9:00 am
Minority Scholars' Committee Mentoring Breakfast ...129
7:30 am – 9:30 am
Business Meeting of the Crossroads Advisory Board ...129
8:00 am – 9:30 am
Breakfast Meeting of International Journal Editors ...129
Breakfast Forum: Teaching Politics and the Politics of Teaching: Three Scholars Share Pedagogical Strategies (Sponsored by the Students' Committee)...129
8:00 am – 9:45 am
Screening Crossroads: A Transatlantic Dialogue on America and Film...130
Marked by Dirt: The Embodiment of Difference on the Body and by the State...130
Canine America: How Dogs Shape American Personhood, Poetics, and Publics...131
Cross-Bodies: Filipina/os in Transnational Spaces...131
In Motion: Crossroad Variations and the Work of Praxis...132
Theorizing Race, Gender, and Sexuality at the Crossroads of the Popular and the Profane...132
No Laughing Matter: Race and American Visual Humor...132
Inter-American Perspectives on Culture and Migration in the Americas...133
Hearing Gender/Sounding Gender...133
Post-Border Mexico? The Paradigmatic Drama of the Border in and for Inter-American Studies...134
American Studies at the Intersection of Food and Health: Science, Policy, and Culture...134
The U.S. Militarization of the Pacific: Oceanic Crossings in the Colonial Present...135
Challenging Ecocriticism: New Directions for the Study of Literature and Environment...135
Visualizing Racial Violence...136
Positioning Native America with/in American Studies...136
Negotiating Asian/Native Identity...137
Debating Public Art in New Mexico...137
Rights, Knowledge, Activism...138
9:30 am – 11:30 am
Business Meeting of the Encyclopedia of American Studies Editorial Board ...138
10:00 am – 11:30 am
Business Meeting of the Science and Technology Caucus ...138
10:00 am – 11:45 am
Subjugated Pasts and Histories of the Present...139
Indigenous Studies Bound (and Unbound): Institutional Realities and Professional Pressures...139
International Committee Talkshop II: Crossroad Adventures: The Practice of International American Studies Since the "Transnational Turn"...140
The State of Comix: Cultural Identity, the Nation, and the Visual Politics of American Comics (Sponsored by the Visual Culture Caucus)...140
Teaching at the Crossroads: American Studies and Film Studies...140
Race, U.S. Orientalism, and the Global "War on Terror"...141
No Somos Criminales/We Are Not Criminals: Latina/o Music and Performance as Decolonizing Practices in the (neo) Colonial Borderlands...141
Liberal Racism in Academic Institutions...142
Imagineering Public History: Contradictions, Gentrification, and Counterstorytelling in Northern New Mexico Public Spaces...142
Back Down to the Ground: Race, Structural Inequality, and the Violence of Everyday Queer Life...143
Techno-Aesthetic Strategies in Black Music...143
Food and Identity...144
Coloniality and Imperialism in the Philippines...144
Thinking Big About American Studies: From Case Studies to Field Imaginaries...144
Power and Public Spaces...145
Maps and Geographies of Malleable Spaces...145
The Black Press in the Twentieth Century...146
Labor and Representation...146
10:00 am – 12:00 pm
Walking Tour of Downtown Albuquerque ...147
10:30 am – 12:00 pm
Breakfast Forum: The Future of American and Ethnic Studies (Sponsored by the Students' Committee and the Ethnic Studies Committee)...147
12:00 pm – 1:30 pm
Business Meeting of the Environment and Culture Caucus ...147
12:00 pm – 1:45 pm
Premature Antifascism: Hollywood and Nazism in the 1930s...148
New Directions in Italian American Popular Culture Studies...148
American Studies at the Digital Crossroads...148
Craft at the Crossroads Roundtable (Sponsored by the Material Culture Caucus)...149
Middle Passages: Resisting Forced Migration in the Atlantic, Chinese, and U.S. Internal Slave Trades...149
Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas (Sponsored by the Early American Matters Caucus)...150
Walls, Borders, and Militarization: A Comparative Dialogue on U.S./Mexico and Israel/Palestine (Sponsored by the Committee on Ethnic Studies)...150
Food and Local/Global Imaginaries...151
Democratic Vistas II...151
Queer Theory, Racial Formation, Neoliberalism...152
Gender, Sexuality, and Space: Occupation, Crossings, and Lines of Flight...152
In Search of Home: Refugees and Representation Along U.S. Borderlands...152
Lingering at the Crossroads: Building Transnational Perspectives into American Studies Programs...153
Indigeneity, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Place...153
Transpacific Cultural Production...154
The Counterintuitive Whitman...154
Photography in Print...155
12:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Business Meeting of the Internation Committee ...155
Women's Committee Luncheon: Talking about Power: Discussions with ASA Presidents on Intersectionality, Their Leadership, and the U.S. Presidency ...155
2:00 pm – 3:45 pm
ASA-JAAS Project Advisory Committee Business Meeting ...156
Brokering Borders: The Transnational Makings of Mexican American Citizenship Across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1935–1980...156
Hateful Saints, a Sodom City, and the Ku Klux Klan: Anti-Catholicism in the Americas...156
The Day that Martin Died: The Politics and Poetics of Loss...157
Be a Better Writer: How to Produce Strong Abstracts, Proposals, and Cover Letters (Sponsored by the Students' Committee)...157
Innovative Interpretations of Nineteenth-Century Western Imagery...158
Survivance: Gerald Vizenor for Thirty Years...158
Disability and Youth Culture: "Mental Defective" Embodiment, Special Education, and the Brain (Sponsored by the Childhood and Youth Studies Caucus)...159
National, International, Planetary? American Studies Meets Comparative Literature...159
Eating at the Crossroads of Agricultural, Environmental, and Cultural History...160
Due Processes: Perspectives on Deportation (Sponsored by the Committee on Ethnic Studies)...160
Mutual Contamination at the Limits: Becoming Human/Artist...161
Transnational Regions...161
Theories in American Studies II: Race...161
Transmitting Public Feelings: Bodies, Emotions, and Politics...162
An All-Consuming War? Gender and Mass Culture in the Vietnam Combat Zone: A Junior Scholar Roundtable...162
The Crossroads of the Americas: Revolutionary Hispanophone Writers in the Nineteenth-Century United States...162
Music Production, Exchange, and Performance: Online Videos, Cultural Authority, and Transnational Entertainment Gateways...163
Queer Studies, Media Studies...163
Art, Craft, and Film in Native America...164
On Location: Film Histories...164
2:30 pm – 3:30 pm
Material Culture Caucus Business Meeting ...165
3:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Early American Caucus Business Meeting ...165
3:45 pm – 4:45 pm
Business Meeting of the Visual Culture/Art History Caucuses ...165
4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Celebration of ASA Authors ...165
4:00 pm – 5:45 pm
The Sixties: A Conversation with Mark Rudd...165
Migration, Racialization, and Resistance: African Americans, Mexicanos, and Mexican Americans in Comparative Urban Experience (Sponsored by the Committee on Ethnic Studies)...165
Crossroads, Borderlands, Diaspora: Remapping the Terrains of Native American Studies...166
American Humor in Theory and Practice: A Discussion...166
America's Religious Crossroads: Racialized Transnational Communities and State Power across Historical Periods...167
Rethinking the State(s) of America...167
The Julian Samora Legacy Project: A Model for the Reclamation and Mining of Historical Archives...168
American Studies and Anthropology: The Road Less Traveled...168
At the Crossroads of Representation and Use: Negotiating Conflict and Distinction on the Postwar Sub\Urban Landscape...169
Integrating Conspiracy into the Shaping of American Identities...169
Sacred/Secular Crossroads and Conundrums...170
Beyond the Binary: Mapping the Intersections of "Indian"and "Black" Lives in the Southeast...170
Energy, Culture, Environment...171
Legal Borderlands: The Uses of Race, Gender, and Aesthetics in the Making of American Imperial Identity...171
Troubling Citizenship: Belonging, Community, and Resistance in an Age of Migration...171
Colonial Frictions in the Present Tense: U.S. Colonialism, Racial Formation, Sovereignty...172
Places of Critical Thinking...172
Black Fiction in the Atlantic World from Clotel to Tar Baby...173
Radio: Medium and Metaphor...173
4:30 pm – 5:30 pm
Religion and American Culture Caucus Meeting ...174
5:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Journal of Transnational American Studies Launch Reception (American Studies Program, Stanford University and American Cultures & Global Contexts Center, UC-Santa Barbara) ...174
Reception for the University of New Mexico Department of American Studies/Gerald Vizenor Book Signing ...174
Joint Reception of the Visual Culture/Art History Material Culture Causes ...174
New York University Program in American Studies Reception ...174
Reception for Graduate Students (Sponsored by the ASA Student Committee)...175
6:00 pm – 7.00 pm
K-16 Collaboration Committee Business Meeting ...175
7:00 pm – 8:00 pm
ASA Awards Ceremony...175
8:00 pm – 9:30 pm
ASA Presidential Address: Broadway and Main: Crossroads, Ghost Roads, and Paths to the American Studies Future...175
9:30 pm – 11:55 pm
ASA President's Reception and Dance...176
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2008
8:00 am – 9:30 am
Business Meeting of the American Studies Association Caucuses ...177
Breakfast Forum: Framing Visual Evidence: The Position of Visual and Popular Culture in American Studies (Sponsored by the Students' Committee)...177
8:00 am – 9:45 am
Twentieth-Century Indigenous Music at the Crossroads: Activism and Cultural Traditions in Transition...177
Alternative Contact I: Race and Indigeneity in Hawai'i...177
Visions and Revisions: How to Build a High School American Studies Program (Sponsored by the K–16 Collaboration Committee)...178
Historical Crosses: Religious Culture in Earlier America...178
Crossing Borders: Political Theory and American Studies at the Crossroads...179
Art and Engaged Citizenship: The Case of the LAB...179
Digital Crossroads: Online Tools for Open and Collaborative Research...180
Homefront: Iraq...180
Remapping Latina/o Chicago...180
Media Matters: Access, Ownership, and Diversity...181
Reexamining Early Twentieth-Century South Asian American Histories...181
East Goes Western: Seeing the Cowboy through Korean and Korean American Eyes...182
Remembrance and Re-vision: Alternative Genealogies of Race...182
Black Poetry Matters: Black Poetry at the Crossroads of Subalternity and Cultural Studies...182
Public Art and Historic Preservation...183
Remembering and Representing Native American Pasts...183
Diasporic Networks...184
Race and Gender in American Dance...184
10:00 am – 11:45 am
Innocence and Complicity: Contemporary Rhetorics of Victimhood, Violence, and Justice...185
Kill Them with Love: Punk and Performance, Race and Gender...185
Alternative Contact II: Contesting American (Indian) Lands and Nations...186
International Committee Talkshop III: The State of Women's Studies Around the World...186
The Crossroads of Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, and Desire...187
Immigrant Masculinities Meeting at the Crossroads of Religion and Sex...187
Origin Stories: National Identities and Hegemonic Memories in the American Southwest, 1898–1940...188
Onshore and Offshore: American Studies for Export...188
Reading Contemporary U.S. Political Memoirs...188
Crossroads with Various Intersections: (Geo)Cultural and Ethnic "Triple/Multiple Consciousness" in a Transnational Age...189
Reproduction at the Crossroads...189
At the Crossroads of Children's Studies and American Studies: Intersections, Possibilities, Challenges...190
Clashes and Alliances: Reframing America and the Middle East...190
Latino/a Resistance in L.A....191
Black Rights and Citizenship...192
Picturing Culture: The Politics of Image and Illustration...192
Trafficking in Folklore...193
10:00 am – 2:00 pm
Business Meeting of the 2009 Program Committee ...193
10:30 am – 12:00 pm
Breakfast Forum: Getting Great Advising: A Workshop for Graduate Students (Sponsored by the Students' Committee)...193
12:00 pm – 1:45 pm
Coloring Outside the Lines: Performing Race in Children's Books...193
Race, Nature, and Nation at the Crossroads...194
Policing the Crisis: On the Importance of Stuart Hall...194
Beautiful Kitsch and Random Form: The Role of Aesthetics in the Politics of Access...195
Alternative Contact III: Mixed-Race Indigeneity...195
Cultural Crossroads: Middlebrow and the (Re)making of American Studies...196
Reconstruction and Revision...196
Civilizing and Decivilizing Processes: A Figurational Approach to American Studies...196
Taking the "Crossroads" Literally: Reenactments of Historical Journeys and the Bodily Performance of America...197
U.S. Latinos/as at War: Identity and Citizenship at the Crossroads and in the Cross Hairs...197
Ghost Notes and Spirit Moves: What Jazz Studies Doesn't Hear...198
Cosmopolitan Humanitarianism in the Progressive-Era Settlement Movement...198
At the Crossroads of Feminism, Race, and American Studies...199
Black Detroit and Beyond: At the Crossroads of Color, Culture, and Community....199
"See-Saw": A Performance by Jeffrey Q. McCune...200
Activists and Movements...200
Once and Future Wars...200
Asia/Pacific/America: Contact Zones...201
12:00 pm – 2:00 pm
K–16 Collaboration Committee Luncheon ...201
2:00 pm – 3:45 pm
Orientalism and American Studies: Locating Edward Said...202
Maneuvering Race, Labor, and Place in America's Cities: Tactical Survival in an Urban Context...202
Critical Regionalism and American Studies: The Comparative Case of Chicana/o Regionalisms (Sponsored by the Site Resource Committee)...203
Scholarly Reportage: American Studies Meets Journalism, Ethnography, and Creative Nonfiction...203
Changing the Subject: New Perspectives on Gender and Racial Identification...204
Critical Race Feminism and the Literary Imagination of Law...204
The Religious Left in Modern America (Sponsored by the Religion and American Culture Caucus)...205
Race, Nature, and Nation at the Crossroads II...205
Between Local and Transnational: Considering American Studies from Positions in the Regionals...206
African American Women at the Crossroads: Identity, Memory, and the Creation of a Useable Past...206
If You Meet a Punk at the Crossroads, Kill the Buddha: Punk Rock and the Politics of Geolocality...207
Mock Job Interview Workshop (Sponsored by the Students' Committee)...207
Theories in American Studies III: Class...207
At the Crossroads of Technology and Transnationalism: A Conversation with Michael Adas (Sponsored by the Science and Technology Caucus)...208
Cross-Cultural Encounters: Person-Centered Approaches...208
Reflections on Race in Comparative Ethnic Studies...209
Gatherings of Nations: American Indian Song, Dance, Art, and Exhibitions...209
Museums and the Politics of Memory...210
4:00 pm – 5:45 pm
Coloring America: (Dis)Identifying Hues and Shades of Latinidad(es) through Diverse Approaches to U.S. Latina/o Culture...210
Transpacific American Studies: Texts and Methods...211
Crossroads and Crossover: American Top 40 as Cultural Exchange...211
Toxic Crossroads: The Transnational Legacies of Agent Orange...212
Teaching Memoirs and Oral History in the K–12 Classroom: Identities at the Crossroads (Sponsored by the K–16 Collaboration Committee)...212
An American Studies Worthy of Emulation: The Legacy of David W. Noble...213
Recasting Black Transnationalism: Race and Performance on the Global Stage...213
Life Is Complicated: Coming to Terms with Seething Pasts, Haunting Memories, and Economies of Inequity...213
At the Crossroads of Representation: Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinas/os in U.S. Culture...214
Slavery, Sexuality, and the Shape of Public Memory in the United States, 1888–1985...214
Conditions of Production: Feminist and Queer of Color Engagements with Subjectivity, Nationalism, and Violence...215
Asian Bodies, American Mediation, Transnational Movements...215
Crossing Over: American Jews and Their Others in Suburbia...216
Urban Crossings: Interethnic Encounters in Cultural Practice...216
Musical Cross-Pollination in Rhythm, Blues, and Rap...217
Biopolitics and Transnationalism...217
Prison, Plantation, and Empire...218
5:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Mid-America American Studies Reception ...218
Center for Mexican American Studies University of Texas at Austin Reception ...218
University of Southern California—Department of American Studies and Ethnicity Reception ...219
University of Michigan Reception ...219
5:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Film Night at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center ...219
6:00 pm – 7:45 pm
Interdisciplinary Approaches to Teaching Immigration (Sponsored by the K–16 Collaboration Committee)...219
8:00 pm – 10:00 pm
University of Texas American Studies Reception ...220
Yale University Reception ...220
University of Minnesota Reception ...220
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2008
8:00 am – 9:45 am
Rewriting Radicalism in the Cold War...221
Queering Children, Queering Family: Race, Labor, and Economy...221
Engaging Exception: Interdisciplinarity, Intervention, and "States of Exception" in U.S. Imperial Pasts and Presents...222
Print, Publics, and Racial Feeling...222
Sculpting Model Americanness: The Intersecting Regulatory Regimes of Normative Citizenship...222
Tradition and Change in Country Music of the 1970s...223
Environmental History and Policy-Making in the United States and Mexico...223
Culture and Consumption in the American City...224
Photography, Power, and the Body...225
Saints, Sacrifice, and Sovereignty...225
10:00 am – 11:45 am
Propaganda before the Twentieth Century...225
Of Factories, Supermarkets, and Bomb Shelters: Sensory Environments, Perception, and New Questions in American Studies...226
Eating the "Other"...226
The Speculative Logic of Racial Violence: Investments in Empire in the 1830s...227
Does History Influence Identity? An Exploration of the Third Generation of Armenians in America...227
Ultimate Sacrifices: Religion and Violence in American Popular Culture (Sponsored by the Religion and American Culture Caucus)...228
Kinesthetics Visualized: Posture, Gesture, and Movement in Twentieth-Century Visual Culture...228
Piles of Memories: Hurricane Katrina and Native Peoples of Louisiana...229
Routes of U.S. Imperial Capital: Intersections of Political Economy and Desire in the Transnational Pacific...229
10:30 am – 5:00 pm
Tour of Acoma Pueblo ...230