Geographies of American Studies

This workshop will address the issue of normative geographies in the academic practice of American studies. It is based on the geographical commonplace that spatialized practices and hierarchies are not simply recognized or reflected in routine human activities and discourses but are in fact actively produced by them: that the normative geographies of American studies are a form of contested common sense and not just “the way things are.”

Firstly, as a workshop rather than a conventional paper or panel discussion performance, the session will disrupt the spatial hierarchies of power involved in the traditional speaker-audience format, which permits only certain kinds and channels of conversation. The workshop is in this sense intended to defamiliarize and destabilize the conventionally spatialized practices of the conference as a disciplinary space. We hope to produce an alternative space in which scholars usually separated by a variety of physical and relational distances will be able to share ideas, discover differences, and negotiate meanings. Within this temporary place, we plan to ask participants to share ideas about the geographies of American studies in order to destabilize and defamiliarize their own routine practices and frameworks and to explore the extent to which those of us present have significantly different (but to each of us, equally ‘natural’) disciplinary geographies.

Secondly, having through this decentered communicative setting opened up the question of the ways in which language produces place, and having started a discussion of the ways in which assumptions about place generate particular discursive practices and thereby create new geographies of practice, the workshop will zoom out from the scale of the conference session to consider the wider geographical issues involved in the conceptualization of American studies as an international discipline. We will lead an open discussion centering on the ways in which location, geospatial assumptions, language, terminologies, and disciplinary practices not only foster a global American studies network but also reinforce inequalities implicit in binary dynamics such as center/margin and inside/outside. Examining as a group what we variously mean by the terms “American hemisphere” and “western hemisphere,” for example, will lead us to unpack the geographical power relations that operate as a kind of subtext in Americanists’ conversations about the discipline and its futures.

The workshop will be roughly divided into three parts, but depending on the size of the workshop, the organizers will adjust the format and timing:

1. brief organizers’ introduction that sets out some of the most useful concepts for the discussions; then time allotted for participants to introduce themselves and ask each other questions
2. discussion using handouts and keywords as the discussion starters to explore what participants think the terms and keywords mean, either as one group or in smaller groups
3. discussion of the variety of meanings and connotations of the keywords and concepts, including reports from groups on their discussions if necessary