SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS (updated with information on plenary speakers, conference events, extended deadline, and prospective costs)

Biannual conference of the Nordic Association for American Studies
Thursday 28 May-Sunday 31 May, 2009
University of Copenhagen, Denmark

COSMOPOLITAN AMERICA?: THE UNITED STATES IN TRANSITION

Plenary speakers:

• MATTHEW FRYE JACOBSON (Yale University). Author of Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (Hill and Wang, 2000); Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Harvard UP, 1998); and Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (U of California P, 1995).

• BRENT HAYES EDWARDS (Columbia University). Author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard UP, 2003) and co-editor of Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia UP, 2004).

Danish Association for American studies plenary speaker
• EDWARD ASHBEE (Copenhagen Business School). Author of The Bush Administration, Sex, and the Moral Agenda (Manchester UP, 2007) and U.S. Politics Today (Manchester UP, 2004); co-editor of The Politics, Economics, and Culture of Mexican-US Migration: Both Sides of the Border (Palgrave, 2007).

Conference events include a closing banquet and concert at Copenhagen Jazzhouse.

In “Trans-national America” (1916), Randolph Bourne celebrated the United States as a “cosmopolitan federation of national colonies, of foreign cultures,” and concluded that “[a]ny movement which attempts to thwart this weaving” together of foreign cultures “is false to this cosmopolitan vision.” Bourne’s essay has been rediscovered in recent years due to the “transnational turn” in American studies; however, his use of the term “cosmopolitan” has received less attention. Yet there are clear signs that, like transnationalism, cosmopolitanism is achieving renewed prominence in scholarship both within and beyond American studies. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006) recasts long-standing philosophical ideas of cosmopolitanism to provide an alternative to contested ideas of “globalization” and “multiculturalism”; Appiah posits a “partial cosmopolitanism” that enables people to combine a global, ethical outlook with “the partialities of kinfolk and community.” In African American studies, Brent Hayes Edwards has traced the cosmopolitan dimensions of “black internationalism.” In U.S. literary studies, Tom Lutz has recast established ideas of regionalism to make the case for “cosmopolitan vistas,” while Leigh Anne Duck has argued that U.S. southern literature exhibits “provincial cosmopolitanism.” In the field of history, David Hollinger makes the case for a cosmopolitan, postethnic America that promises to be ethnically less circumscribed than multicultural America.
However, the work of other scholars suggests that Bourne’s vision of the United States as a “unique,” even exceptional, “cosmopolitan enterprise” no longer holds. For example, Parag Khanna argues that the United States of Europe has eclipsed the United States of America by “transforming Europe’s identities from tribal to cosmopolitan.” Ian Tyrrell suggests that a cosmopolitan, transnational view of history spells the death-knell of American exceptionalism. Meanwhile Todd Gitlin and Richard Rorty have warned of the “dangers” and limits of cosmopolitanism, advocating instead a revised form of patriotism.

The 2009 NAAS conference organizers invite scholars from all areas of American studies and related subjects to join us in contemplating the conundrum of cosmopolitanism. Is the United States in transition to--or away from—Randolph Bourne’s “cosmopolitan vision”? Is cosmopolitanism actually desirable, or might patriotism be preferable? Is cosmopolitanism a viable alternative to “the clash of civilizations”? How does cosmopolitanism relate to U.S. foreign policy? Is U.S. foreign policy moving in a more cosmopolitan direction? Does the 2008 presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, the biracial son of a Kansas mother and a Kenyan father, suggest a (re)emergent cosmopolitan America? Does Congressional resistance to the McCain-Kennedy immigration act suggest the limits of U.S. cosmopolitanism? Has the influx of Hispanic and other non-white immigrants to the South generated a new form of regional or provincial cosmopolitanism? Does the prominence of immigrant writers such as Junot Dìaz, Ha Jin, Dinaw Mengestu, and Edwidge Danticat–or the focus on border regions and bilingualism in the works of older writers like Cormac McCarthy—suggest a cosmopolitan turn in contemporary “American” literature?

The conference organizing committee invites proposals for workshops and individual papers. Proposals relating to any area of American studies will be considered, but the conference organizing committee is particularly interested in proposals relating cosmopolitanism to the following sub-themes:
• Transnationalism
• The “transnational turn” in American studies
• U.S. national identity
• U.S. nationalism
• Patriotism
• Regionalism
• Borderlands/frontiers
• U.S. vernacular cultures
• U.S. and world music cultures
• Globalization
• U.S. cities as “global cities”
• U.S. exceptionalism
• U.S. foreign policy
• The U.S. in the context of global history/world history
• “Cosmopolitics”
• Isolationism and interventionism
• Migration/immigration
• The black diaspora/Black Atlantic
• The U.S. and the world after 9/11
• The Bush presidency
• Scandinavian-American connections
• U.S. “soft power”
• Revisionist views of “American” literature
• Representations of the United States in cultural forms from other countries, and in languages other than English

Please send proposals to bone@hum.ku.dk by 1 December 2008. Proposals for individual panel presentations (between 15-20 minutes) should be no more than one page long; proposals for panels or workshops (90 minutes, including approximately 30 minutes for audience questions and discussion) should be no more than two pages long.

It is anticipated that the conference fee will be approximately 700-800kr, with a discounted rate of approximately 500kr for postgraduate students. Attendance at the closing banquet and concert at Copenhagen Jazzhouse on Saturday 30 May will cost approximately 400kr, and is optional. NB: precise costs to be confirmed, contingent on external funding.

The NAAS 2009 organizing committee is:
• Dr. Martyn Bone (University of Copenhagen)
• Dr. Jørn Brøndal (University of Southern Denmark, Odense)
• Dr. Inge Birgitte Siegumfeldt (University of Copenhagen)
• Dr. Anne Dvinge (University of Copenhagen)
• Prof. David Nye (University of Southern Denmark, Odense)
• Dr. Carl Pedersen (Copenhagen Business School)
• Dr. Vibeke Schou-Tjalve (Danish Institute for Military Studies, Copenhagen)