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ASA-JAAS
Call for Proposals: Pacific Worlds: Empire, Environment and Embodiment (Due October 1, 2011)
The American Studies Association (ASA) and the Japanese Association for American Studies (JAAS), with support from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission (JUFSC), are pleased to announce a competition open to ASA members (U.S. citizens). We plan to select (CONTINGENT UPON FUNDING) two ASA delegates for participation in the annual JAAS conference to be held in June 2012. We invite proposals for papers to be presented at the JAAS conference and possible themes for the two-day pro-seminars. The award covers round trip airfare to Japan, housing, and modest daily expenses.
The members of the ASA-JAAS Project Advisory Committee and the International Committee of JAAS will choose the delegates by collaborative assessment and selection. Two-day pro-seminars will be held, most likely after the JAAS conference, which will enable JAAS scholars to participate. Themes of the pro-seminars will follow from, but not necessarily repeat the conference theme. The ASA delegates will collaborate with the International Committee of JAAS in finalizing the themes of the pro-seminars and will be responsible for constructing the syllabi and assigning the readings. The pro-seminars will be open to the entire range of JAAS members, from graduate students (including those who may not yet be JAAS members) to senior scholars. Under the proposed project, the ASA delegates will spend two days at the JAAS conference, two days in their pro-seminars, plus travel time, for a total of about a week.
Project Theme:
This is the first year of our new proposal for scholarly exchanges between the American Studies Association (ASA) and the Japan Association for American Studies (JAAS) covering the three-year project period, 2012-2014.
The scholarly theme is Pacific Worlds: Empire, Environment, Embodiment. Scholarship focused upon international and transnational relationships faces the challenge of boundary drawing. When the nation-state is no longer taken for granted as a unit of social and cultural analysis, and the globe is identified as a horizon of concern, the transnational risks becoming amorphous. Scholars of region, and particularly of the Atlantic world, have long illuminated ways of thinking transnational relations in relation to a delimited set of flows and exchanges over time that shaped a common if unevenly (and unequally) constituted social and historical experience among statesmen, sailors, slaves and commoners. More recently, scholars have started to map the Pacific world in similar ways, identifying specific paths of commerce, military conflict, colonization and migration that have defined the Pacific as a distinct place and region for policy-makers, and empire-builders, soldiers, artists and writers, peasants, workers and migrants.
We seek to consider some of the ways in which the Pacific Ocean has been constituted as a transnational region across several centuries. Most broadly, we are interested in exploring how forms of human belonging and experience might be understood in regional terms that exceed typically national, even comparative frames of reference. For example, how have competing and at times complementary forms of imperial ambition and material investment on the part of the US, Japan, and other nations fashioned the Pacific as a region of common interest, investment, desire, and (for some) dispossession? As pressures of market activity, human energy and resource needs roil this vast, shared oceanic environment, what forms of cooperative knowledge and practice can sustain Pacific worlds (as well as other fragile ecologies) into the future? Against doom saying prophecies of a “clash of civilizations,” how can regions shaped by overlapping colonialisms and diasporas imagine new forms of regional membership, linked fate, or even kinship?
Comparative Empire and the Making of the Pacific World (2012)
The first year of the project will encourage proposals that consider the ramified ways in which the question of “empire” is at the center of inquiry into regional transnationalism in general and the formation of the Pacific world in particular. The fact that our modernity has been shaped by imperialism and colonialism is settled, but it continues to generate exciting new scholarship across the disciplines. Recent scholars of the cultures and politics of US imperialism within American Studies have re-emphasized the centrality (and continuity) of westward expansion and visions of Pacific dominion to the rise of US globalism in the twentieth-century. Pacific worlds were key sites for the development of transnational imperial networks, including policing and security regimes, forms of agricultural, medical and scientific knowledge, practice and experimentation. Commercial and military exchange under imperial and colonial auspices did not preclude, and often augmented rich forms of intellectual and political exchange, cultural circulation and production. Often under austere conditions, migrant workers were key carriers and translators of different worlds, even as they met with exclusion in their new homes.
Application Procedures:
Each application should include a summary in 300 words of the proposed paper to be presented at the JAAS annual meeting. Participants should explain how the proposed paper contributes to a discussion of the project theme in general, and more specifically to the 2012 conference theme: Comparative Empire and the Making of the Pacific World. Applicants should include a personal statement, no longer than two pages, describing their interest in this project and the issues that their own scholarship and teaching have addressed. Also, provide some possible themes for leading the pro-seminars. Personal statements may include comments on previous collaboration or work with non-U.S. academics or students. Prior experience of work or travel in Japan is not a requirement for selection, but if applicable, applicants may comment on their particular interest in, or connections to, Japan. In addition, applications should include a two-page curriculum vitae, emphasizing teaching experience and major publications and the names and addresses of three references. All applicants must be available to travel for a weeklong period to Japan in June 2012; exact dates required for travel will be forthcoming. Applicants must be current members of the ASA and U.S. citizens, and must attend the ASA annual meeting during the year in which they apply for the grant. Preference will be given to scholars with teaching and research experience.
Application materials should be assembled by the applicant and submitted to the ASA-JAAS Project Advisory Committee electronically (asa-jaas@theasa.net) in the form of a single PDF before midnight (US DST) October 1, 2011. The application (including the 300 word paper summary, 2-page personal statement, and 2-page vitae) should not exceed six pages in length.
Submit Application Online: Go to the online PDF Submission Form
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