ASA Program Book
Sessions at a Glance
Thursday, November 5, 2009
8:00 am - 1:45 pm
Business Meeting of the ASA National Council…97
10:00 am - 11:45 am
Oil Culture: Representations of the Petroleum Industry…97
High-Tech Sustainability and Socioeconomic Justice…97
Domestic Environmentalism: Home, Nation, Globe, Planet…98
New Ethics of Ecological Care and Citizenship…98
Interpreting Images, Icons, and Intent: The White House Residence as Cultural Sphere…99
Perverting Nationalisms: Discourses of Security and the Crafting of Geopolitics…99
Visualizing the Urban Jungle and the Urban Oasis: Cities in the American Environmental Imaginary (sponsored by the Visual Culture Caucus)…100
iAm: The Work of Self in the Age of Digital Replication…100
Against Citizenship…101
The U.S. Nonprofit Industrial Complex and Its Discontents…101
Exploring the Unsustainable: Feminist, Radical, Queer Politics…102
Pedagogical and Story Circle Workshop with Students at the Center, New Orleans…102
Training Sights: The Visual Pedagogies of American Citizenship…102
Genres of Citizenship…103
Violent Belonging…103
Voluntary Communities…104
12:00 pm - 1:45 pm
International Partnership Luncheon…104
U.S. Reproductive Citizenship in a Global Context…104
Visual Culture in the Americas…105
Early America, Asia, and the Pacific (sponsored by the Early American Matters Caucus)…105
Three Perspectives on Citizenship and Belonging: African Americans, Conquered Mexicans, and Immigrant Chinese…106
Photography: Imaging the Future of Race in America…106
Thinking Globally: American Environmentalism and Global Society in the Postwar Era…107
On the Virtues of Academic Citizenship: Pedagogy and Practice in the American Studies College Classroom…107
Circulatory Systems: Affects and Economies…108
The Intimate Bonds of Citizenship: The Citizen as Neighbor and Friend…108
Why Walk When You Can Fly? The Living Stage Praxis of Community Engagement and Mobilization, 1966-2002…109
Intersections of Native American and Japanese American Scholarship: Dispossession, Citizenship, Belonging, and the State…109
Performance Re/Visions: American Theater and National Identity…109
Internment, Redress, and Reparations…110
Visions of Imperial Hegemony…110
Blackness in Musical Performance…111
Transnational Bodies, Performances, and Enactments…111
1:45 pm - 4:45 pm
Business Meeting of the Regional Chapters' Committee…112
2:00 pm - 3:45 pm
Business Meeting of the Women's Committee…112
Business Meeting of the International Committee…112
En-gendering U.S. Diasporic Visions of Caribbean Migration…112
Waging War, Shaping Identity: Exploring Ethnic and Racial Formation during the First and Second World Wars…113
Performing Anti-essentialisms…113
Children and Youth in History: Belonging in the Past and the Present (sponsored by the Childhood and Youth Studies Caucus)…114
Patriotic Investments in Victimhood, Vengeance, and Violence…114
Under the Influence: Affective Historiographies of Queer Nightlife…115
Theorizing Prison/Space/Resistance in Post-World War II America…115
A New Exceptionalism? Citizenship, Identity, and Belonging in Obama's America…116
Poetic Visions in the Wake of Katrina…116
Girls of Color and Performance Ethnography: Imagining New Spaces of Empowerment and Inclusion…117
Hollywood in the 1950s: The Spectacle of Cold War Citizenry…117
Open the Door: Race and Citizenship in Popular Music…117
Drugs, Death, and Belonging…118
Mothering the State…118
Haiti as Icon in Transnational Discourse…119
Transnational Imagined Communities…119
2:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Business Meeting of the American Quarterly Advisory Editorial Board…120
2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Business Meeting of the Students' Committee…120
4:00 pm - 5:45 pm
American Studies Journal Editorial Board Meeting…120
Institutional Strategies of Empowerment and Belonging: Intersections of Union, Community, and Philanthropic Organizing…120
Vulnerable Bodies, Ecological Citizenship, and the Making of Environmental Publics (sponsored by the Environment and Culture Caucus)…121
Barbecue Eating, Gospel Singing, and Bridge Building: Perspectives on Collaborative Scholarship in the U.S. South…121
American Literature as Political Theory: Reimagining Citizenship, Bodies, and Belonging…121
Performing Publics and Counterpublics: Belonging and Boundaries in Early American Theater Culture…122
The Cultural Productions of Oil in the Americas…122
Speculative Sexualities: Nineteenth-Century Theories of Time, Affinity, and Desire…123
A Critical View from Hawai‘i: Pedagogy and Curriculum Workshop…123
Everybody's Disabled Nowadays: Reconfiguring American Studies through Disability…124
Performing Health, Narrativizing Racialized Bodies: AIDS, Cancer, and Medical "Knowledge"…124
Transnational Markets and Communities: Comparative Cultural Citizenship and the Politics of Belonging…125
The Cool of Barack Obama…125
Envisioning a Sustainable Transnational Cultural Policy: Lessons and Inspirations from Across the Hemisphere…126
Hip-Hop, Poetry, and Belonging: Citizenship and the Cultural Politics of Rhyming…126
Dramas of Belonging…126
Racial Productions of the Borderlands…127
Universalism and Its Discontents…127
5:00 pm - 7:45 pm
Business Meeting of the Material Culture Caucus…128
5:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Business Meeting of the Politics and Policy Caucus…128
Business Meeting of the Environment and Culture Caucus…128
Business Meeting of the Religion and American Culture Caucus…128
Business Meeting of the Caucus on Community and Academic Activism…128
6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Business Meeting of the Minority Scholar's Committee…128
6:00 pm - 7:45 pm
Business Meeting of the Humor Studies Caucus…129
Business Meeting of the Science and Technology Caucus…129
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Welcome Reception…129
Friday, November 6, 2009
7:30 am - 9:45 am
Business Meetings of the Presidents of International American Studies Associations and of the International Journal Editors…130
8:00 am - 9:45 am
Mentoring Breakfast of the Minority Scholars' Committee…130
Business Meeting of the Committee for American Studies Centers and Programs…130
Colloquy with Stephanie Smallwood on Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora…130
Finding the Fit and Leading the Way: Aligning Undergraduate American Studies Programs with Institutional Initiatives and Demonstrating Relevance at a Critical Time…130
Citizenship and Belonging: Gender, Race, and Ethnicity in Representations of American Catholicism…131
Breakfast Forum: Ethno-Racial Representation/Popular Culture Scholarship: Practices, Politics, and Positioning in the Academy (sponsored by the Students' Committee)…131
Cultural Citizenship and the Politics of Belonging: South Asian Americans as a Multicultural Case Study…132
Staging Citizenship in the Progressive Era…132
Palimpsestic Belonging: Anticolonialisms of That Day and Neocolonialisms of Today in the Asia/Pacific/Caribbean Nexus…133
Found in Translation: Anti-imperialism and Global Solidarity in the Long Sixties…133
Salseras, Tortilleras, and Alien Invaders: Practices of Queer Latina Belonging…134
Colonialism, Sovereignty, (In)commensurability…134
War, Citizenship, and Latino Identity…135
Sporting Bodies…135
Contemporary Displacements of Humanitarianisms…136
Pasts That Refuse to Go Away…136
Intimate Responses to Empire…137
Living for the City…137
10:00 am - 11:45 am
Business Meeting of the Visual Culture Caucus…137
Business Meeting of the Digital Humanities Caucus…138
America in the Middle East, Area Studies in American Studies…138
GLBT Policy and Movement Building after Proposition 8…138
Contested Subjects, Contesting Citizenship: Asian Americans and Latinos in the Post-1965 Discourse of Citizenship…139
Popular Fronts: Artists and Activism in the 1930s…139
Freedom and Free Enterprise: Minority Entrepreneurship in Twentieth-Century America…140
Death, Destruction, and Ruin in Nineteenth-Century America…140
Cultural Spaces of Neoliberalism and Modes of Belonging…141
Food Politics, Sustainability, and Citizenship: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue…141
Expanding God's Country: Religious Education in Early American Empires…142
International Committee Talkshop I: The United States Is Not Enough—International Research and Teaching Opportunities in American Studies…142
Graduate Student Sustainability? Graduate Student Unionization and the Casualization of Academic Labor…142
Going Hollywood: Dance Floor Democracy, Social Mixing, and Cultural Citizenship…143
Visual Distortions of the Environment…143
Performing Indian Identities…144
We Need the Funk? Folklore, Fiction, and Humor…144
Citizenship and Humanitarian Discourse…145
Visions of Antiracism, 1890-1940…145
Color Lines and Crossings…146
12:00 pm - 1:45 pm
Luncheon of the Women's Committee…146
Friends, Neighbors, and Social Capital in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature…146
Cultural Citizenship and Sustainable Communities in Post-1965 Asian American Narrative Practice…147
Stepping On and Across Boundaries: Everyday Dance and Belonging…147
Black Man, White Man, Commander-in-Chief: Barack Obama in Popular Visual Culture…148
Palestine in Crisis…148
Producing and Protecting Citizens: The Nexus of Culture, Policy, and Affect…149
Cultures of African American Commodity Consumption…149
Pressing Herself into the National Conversation: Race, Class, and the Power of Women's Writing in the Early Twentieth Century…150
International Committee Talkshop II: Presidential Politics, Administrative Change, and Teaching American Studies Overseas…150
Citizenship and Modernity in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands…151
Fat Fictions and the Culture of Consumption: Citizenship in the Era of Obesity…151
Claiming Housing Rights…151
Precarious Belonging: Place, Community, and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature…152
Combating Inequalities in Higher Education: An Agenda for Tough Times (sponsored by the Minority Scholars' Committee)…152
Demystifying Publishing: A Discussion with Writers and Editors…153
Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai‘i (a film screening and dialogue with the director)…153
Indigeneity and Sustainability…153
A Nation of Bodies, or Embodying the Nation…154
2:00 pm - 3:45 pm
Business Meeting of the ASA-JAAS Project Advisory Committee…154
Business Meeting of the K-16 Collaboration Committee…154
Faculty Mentoring Coffee Hour (hosted by the Students' Committee)…154
Citizenship and Aesthetics…155
Commies, Christians, and Queers: Subcultures of Letters in Twentieth-Century America (sponsored by the affiliate organization SHARP)…155
America's Middle East: Cultural Enunciations…156
Feeling Like You Belong: Sensory Perception, Experience, and Group Identity…156
There Was a Time: Local and Global Perspectives on the End of Black Power…157
Fictions of Freedom: Blood, Labor, Law, and Bondage…157
Food's Inedible Products: Machines, Labor, and Men…158
Citizen Alien: Asian Americans on the Outer Limits of Television and Nation…158
International Committee Talkshop III: "Only in America Is My Story Possible": Teaching Race and American Studies Overseas, with Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye as a Case Study…159
Frontier Encounters: Citizenship and Belonging in Western Photographic Portraits…159
Claiming Urban Space and Citizenship: The Underground Railroad, East St. Louis, and Skid Row, LA…159
Danger and Beauty: Affect, Aesthetics, and Belonging in Filipino America…160
Strategically Subjectless: Is "Asian American" Sustainable?…160
Humor Studies as American Studies (sponsored by the Humor Studies Caucus)…161
Framing America's Hard Edges: Photographs, Health Imagery, and the (De)construction of Racialized Belonging…161
Citizenship in Sickness and in Death…162
Music and Activism…162
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Celebration of Authors Reception…162
4:00 pm - 5:45 pm
Business Meeting of the Early American Matters Caucus…162
Cultural Assimilation, Criminal Codes, and Nativism: Visions of Early American Citizenship…163
Pressing the Borders: A Roundtable on Transhemispheric Latino/a Studies…163
Darwin in America: A Keywords Approach to the Darwin Bicentennial…164
Visual Citizenship: A Roundtable Discussion…164
Countercitizenships in Latino Music…165
The May Day Protests, Grassroots Mobilization, and the Politics of Citizenship…165
Commodity Cultures, Contested Citizenships, and Transnational American Studies…166
Grace Lee Boggs: Radical Activism and Revolutionary Theory for the Twenty-first Century…166
America and Transnational Belonging in Asian American Literature and Film…167
Reading the (USA PAT-)RIOT Act…167
Spotlight on Student ASA Regional Award Winners (sponsored by the Students' Committee and Regional Chapters' Committee)…168
Misrecognizing Islam: Transnational Identity Politics, Global Citizenship, and Muslims…168
The Assault of Laughter: The Meanings of Humor in Mark Twain's America…169
The City in Ruins? Arguing the Case for the "Other America" in The Wire 169
Musical Geographies of Belonging…170
Exporting American Dreams…170
Genealogies of U.S. Empire…171
5:00 pm - 6:45 pm
In Memoriam: Emory Elliot…171
5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Reception of the Purdue University American Studies Program…171
Reception of the University of Minnesota…172
Reception of the Penn State Harrisburg American Studies Program…172
Reception of the University of Maryland Department of American Studies…172
5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Reception of the Students' Committee…172
6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Reception of the Visual Culture and Material Culture Caucuses (sponsored by Boston University's American and New England Studies Program)…172
7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
ASA Awards Ceremony…172
8:00 pm - 9:30 pm
ASA Presidential Address…172
9:30 pm - 11:55 pm
ASA President's Reception…172
Saturday, November 7, 2009
7:45 am - 9:45 am
Business Meeting of the Editorial Board of the Encyclopedia of American Studies…174
8:00 am - 9:45 am
Technologies of War…173
Queer Belongings: Alternative Modes of Citizenship and Community…173
Racial Narratives of Belonging and Practices of Cultural Citizenship for Asian America…174
Spatializing Culture: The Production of Difference in the Built Environment…174
Neocitizenship…175
Grotesque Masculinities in Contemporary American Art and Culture…175
American Quarterly Editorial Board Panel I: Between Life and Death: Race, Social Death, Necropolitics, Disposability…176
Republic in Fragments: Identity, Belonging, and Nationhood after Loughran…176
The Courts of Public Memory: Trauma, Nation, and Reconciliation…177
Migration, Science, and Technology…177
Tools for Teachers: American Studies Resources for the K-16 Classroom…178
The Contradictions of Environmentality…178
Something to Declare: Latina/o and Caribbean Place-Making Performances…179
Breakfast Forum: Transnational Methodologies: Toward a Substantive Practice of Transnational American Studies (sponsored by the Students' Committee)…179
Sustaining Happiness: Commercial and Personal Pleasure during the Great Depression…180
Race, Empire, and Migratory Radicalisms: Considerations on American Anticolonialism…180
Practices of Alienation, Extinction, and Exclusion: Prison as a Problem in American Studies…181
Signals and Noise: The Cultural Politics of Sound Technologies…181
10:00 am - 11:45 am
The New Black/American: The Cultural Politics of National/Racial Identity in the Obama Era…182
Sustaining Ecological Citizenship in a Transcultural World: From Colonial History and Literature to Contemporary Film (I and II)…182
American Missionaries as Transnational Cultural Critics (sponsored by the Religion and American Culture Caucus)…183
Aging Citizen: Queer Belonging in the Post-Baby Boomer State…183
Reframing American Studies: Hemispheric Citizenship and Transnational Affiliation in the Americas…184
Baseball and Belonging: Practices of Citizenship on the Diamond and Beyond…185
American Quarterly Editorial Board Panel II: Between Life and Death: Race, Social Death, Necropolitics, Disposability…185
Rethinking "Therapeutic Culture"…186
Roundtable: What Can We Learn from the Sciences? National Science Foundation Funding (sponsored by the Science and Technology Caucus)…186
It Ain't Easy Living in the City: HBO's The Wire, Labor, and Political Economy at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century…187
Red Light, Green Light: Same-Sex Marriage, Family Policy, and the Rights of Citizenship…187
Mock Job Interview Workshop (sponsored by the Students' Committee)…187
Selling Soul: Publics and Markets, Grooves and Revolution…188
Sustaining Transpacific Studies: Empire, Desert, and Circuit…188
We the People Under Stairs: Musical Responses to Katrina…189
Challenging Citizenship: Historical Discussions, Enduring Debates (sponsored by the K-16 Collaboration Committee)…189
Shades of Masculinities and Queer Options: Re/dressing Citizenship…189
Laboring Citizens…190
Talkin' 'bout a Revolution…190
10:00 am - 2:00 pm
Business Meeting of the 2010 Program Committee…191
11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Tour of "1934: A New Deal for Artists" Exhibition…191
12:00 pm - 1:45 pm
K-16 Collaboration Luncheon with Guest Speaker Teresa Murphy…191
The Practice of Labor Photography: A Conversation with Earl Dotter and Mark Rogovin…191
Race After Obama…192
Sustaining Ecological Citizenship in a Transcultural World: From Colonial History and Literature to Contemporary Film II…192
Sexual Citizenship and Racialized (Un)belonging…193
Singing Southern, Sounding Sovereign: Alternative Countries and Country Alternatives…193
Roundtable: Redefinitions of Citizenship and Revisions of Cosmopolitanism: Transatlantic Perspectives…193
Old/New Technologies of Belonging: Books, YouTube, Mobile Devices, and the Sensuousness of Sustainable Futures…194
The Citadel of All Truths: Museum Staff and Academics Offer New Approaches to Domesticity and Citizenship (sponsored by the Material Culture Caucus)…194
Race, Music, and Performance in the Civil Rights Era…195
American Quarterly Editorial Board Panel III: Between Life and Death: Race, Social Death, Necropolitics, Disposability…195
Promesa y Peligro: Dominican Narrations of Representation, Identity, and (Trans)national Belonging…196
Race, Labor, and Incarceration in Early Twentieth-Century American Society and Culture…196
Work and Family in Grad School (sponsored by the Students' Committee)…197
Longing to Belong: Sexuality and Queer Citizenship in San Francisco…197
Michelle Obama as Subject and Citizen: Mass Culture and the "First" Lady…198
Mexicans, Indians, and Crises of Conquest and Belonging…198
Visualizing Color…199
Academic Freedom and the Right to Education: The Question of Palestine (sponsored by the Program Committee)…199
2:00 pm - 3:45 pm
Birth, Belonging, and Rights…199
Queer (Be)longings: Sex, Race, and Radicalism in Twentieth-Century Literature on the Left…200
The City as History…200
Bad Citizenship and Good Games: Video Gaming, Criminality, and Citizenship…201
Media Society=Media Citizenship? Postwar Activism Pushing the Limits of the National Public Sphere…201
Studying War and Peace through American Studies / Studying America by Studying War and Peace…202
Revolution '67 in Newark, New Jersey: Documentary Film in the K-16 American Studies Classroom…202
Regimes of Memory and the Power of Forgetting…203
Balancing Civic Engagement and Graduate Education (sponsored by the Students' Committee and the Graduate Education Committee)…203
Psychiatric Biopower and Practices of Resistance…203
Locating Latina/o Studies in the East Coast…204
Sustaining Everyday Democracy: New Interdisciplinary Approaches…204
Race, Neoliberalism, and Citizenship…205
Intimacy, Race, and Global Citizenship…205
James Baldwin and Devil's Work: Screening Citizenship and National Belonging in Harlem, London, and Istanbul…206
Negotiations over Belonging: Figuring Hmong American Citizenship through Cultural Production…206
Race and the Beauty Industry…207
Black Internationalism and Caribbean Radical Thought in the Americas…207
Michael Jackson and the Contradictions of Belonging…208
2:00 pm - 4:15 pm
Hillwood Museum Open House…208
2:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Business Meeting of All Chairs of ASA Standing Committees…208
4:00 pm - 5:45 pm
Encyclopedias and the Organization of Knowledge in American Studies…208
Literature as Cultural Sustenance: Practicing Citizenship in Childhood Texts…209
Race, Class, and Urban Environmentalism…209
The Color of Whiteness Studies: Studying Whiteness from an Ethnic Studies Perspective…210
Routes to Emancipation: The Politics of Transnational Antiracist Activism…211
Ballads for Post-Americans: Revisiting the Nationalism of the U.S. Popular Front…211
Speculative Science, Future Communities, and the Production of Belonging…212
Alternative Models of Civil Rights Citizenship: Racial Storytelling and Aesthetic Belonging…212
Representation and Resistance in Assimilationist Spaces…213
Sexuality, Psychology, and Normativity…213
Denying Citizenship…214
Racial Inbetweeness: Subtle Constructions of Asian Americanness…214
Roundtable: Belonging and Culture: Making a New Literary History of America…210
4:30 pm - 6:30 pm
Hillwood Private ASA Reception…214
6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Reception of the New York University Program in American Studies…215
6:00 pm - 7:45 pm
In Memoriam: John Hope Franklin…215
Reception of the Mid-America American Studies Association/American Studies Journal Anniversary (hosted by the American Studies departments at the University of Kansas and University of Iowa)…215
Reception of the Early American Matters and Environment and Culture Caucuses…215
Reception of the University of Michigan…215
Reception of the University of Southern California and Roundtable/Exhibit for 60 Years of American Quarterly 215
Sunday, November 8, 2009
7:30 am - 8:00 am
Networking Breakfast for American Studies/Ethnic Studies Program Directors…216
8:00 am - 9:45 am
Tenure and Promotion in American Studies: Guidelines and Issues (Directors' Breakfast Workshop)…216
Zombies and Vampires: Identifying American Anxieties over Alterity and Belonging…216
Working the Citizen: Law, Labor, and American Citizenship…217
New Depression Studies in the New New Deal…217
Neoliberalism, Multiculturalism, and the Means of Digital Humanities Production…218
The State(s) of American Studies…218
Thinking Outside the Academy: Making Spaces for Indigenous Women's Work…219
American Studies 2.0: Student Learning through Documentary Video Production in the American Studies Classroom…219
Black Sexual Citizenship: Queering Diasporic Performances, Practices, and Productions…219
Embodiments of Progress: Technology, Machines, and Belonging in Normalcy…220
Queer Transnationalisms, Queer Mexico City…220
Practices of Community and Belonging: Teaching Graphic Narratives in a Post-9/11 World…221
Biocapitalism, Sustainability, and the Reproduction of Value…222
Borders and Circuits: Performative Geographies, Translation, and the Sustainability of Belonging…222
On the Unlikely Queer Subject…223
Weather and Disaster and Social Belonging…223
10:00 am - 11:45 am
Women and Belonging: Gender and Citizenship in the Realm of Public Memory (sponsored by the Women's Committee)…224
Yes We Did? Symbolic Racial Victories from the Cold War to Barack Obama…224
Citizen Historian: Multiple Perspectives on Studs Terkel…225
Latinidad, Comparative Social Movements, and the Politics of the Possible…225
Roundtable: Bridging Humanities and Social Sciences within American Studies (sponsored by the Committee on American Studies Centers and Programs)…225
Born in the U.S.A.: Native-Born Americans and Second-Class Citizenship in the Early Twentieth Century…226
Nineteenth-Century Geographies of Race and Freedom…226
The Visual West and American Identity: Constructing Nationalism through the Western Landscape, 1860-1985…227
Where Do American Jews Belong? Jewish Ethno-Racial Liminality in the Postwar United States…227
Transnational Adoption between the United States and Asia: Racial and Gendered Violence and Communities of Resistance…228
Visualizing Difference, Consuming Identity…228
Reality of Belonging…229
Limits of Belonging in Nineteenth-Century Literature…229