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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