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| Dimensions of Empire and Resistance: Past, Present, and Future November 15-18, 2012, San Juan, Puerto Rico The Caribe Hilton Hotel, San Juan, Puerto Rico. The site of the 2012 conference calls on us to continue thinking deeply about the conceptual and methodological demands of a truly transnational American Studies. From Christopher Columbus's second voyage in the late fifteenth century to the irony of an African American president's state visit to Puerto Rico in the early twenty-first, the long history of this island and its peoples evokes many crucial themes regarding the transnational traffics generated by imperialism and anti-imperialism: indigeneity, conquest, and resistance; the administrative and juridical structures of empire; slavery and emancipation; migrations and diasporas; the mutually constitutive relationship between gender and sexuality on the one hand and imperial practice, subjugation, resistance, or citizenship on the other; the politics of inclusion and exclusion; militarism; local, national, and transnational feminisms; the footprints of corporate capitalism, from extraction to tourism; globalization and neoliberalism; the circuits of slavery and escape, political exile, and cultural production that link Puerto Rico with the larger Caribbean and the Americas; the travel and syncretism of circum-Atlantic arts and musics; the aesthetic traditions of a transnational imaginary; drug traffic; environmental degradation; appalling inequities and the endurance of genius and spirit. Equally important for a transnational American Studies is Puerto Rico's unique relationship to the United States. From the perverse imperial logic of the Insular Cases, whereby the Supreme Court could define Puerto Rico as "foreign in a domestic sense" -- that is, somehow "in" the United States but not "of" it -- to Sonia Sotomayor's ascendance to that very bench (amid dissenting characterizations of her as perhaps more "foreign" than "domestic") a century later, the history of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans sheds a very particular light on the ongoing contradictions of the United States: the limits of U.S. citizenship, the displacements stimulated by neoliberal capitalism, the culture and politics of migration and diaspora. Finally, the simultaneously local and transnational specificities of Puerto Rican history and culture -- from the Taíno revival movement to the Young Lords and the Nuyorican Poets Café, from bomba and plena to Salsa and Reggaeton, from the island's rich journalistic tradition to the alternative political movements of squatters, students, and anti-military activists -- remind us that a transnational American studies must also be a truly interdisciplinary inquiry into how the material and symbolic are imbricated, how "culture" encompasses the imaginary and the everyday, how big political events and ideologies, are lived in intensely translocal ways. Dimensions of Empire and Resistance. Since the publication of Donald Pease and Amy Kaplan's Cultures of United States Imperialism in 1994, empire has come to hold a central place in American Studies scholarship, resulting in a rich and varied literature devoted to the topic in direct, unblinking, and sophisticated ways. The current call goes out to the many scholars working on US empire and its "others," to be sure, whether focusing on Manifest Destiny, the Philippines, Vietnam, or the Middle East, for instance. But by the word dimensions we also seek to broaden the conversation significantly, to set the Hilton Hotel alongside the Baghdad Green Zone, so to say -- to consider the vast spectrum of political and cultural practices running from colonial administration and military occupation; to tourism; to the history of sugar or rum or baseball; to the power dynamics either fostered or legitimated by educational practices and institutions -- in places like Puerto Rico, for instance -- or by "knowledge" and the disciplines themselves; to the quotidian imperialist slanders carried in US popular culture -- and equally, the constant articulations of dissent; to metaphorical usages, like "media empire," which are nonetheless embedded in histories of empire proper; to the transnational logic of a canonical "national treasure" like Moby-Dick; to the thick traces of the imperial past and the anti-imperialist present in a text like Empire of Dreams, by Puerto Rican poet Giannina Braschi. Past, Present, and Future. Although "past" in this context is likely to concentrate the mind on the "splendid little war" of 1898 or on the cartography of US interventionism across ensuing generations, here we also mean to invoke the deep past and its most enduring trajectories, beginning with "encounter" and with conquests now many centuries distant. If European exploration and conquest continue to cast a long shadow across the lands currently under the purview of American Studies, so was the struggle among contending empires a crucible for the political culture of what eventually became the United States. It is one of the great intellectual losses to American Studies in recent years that so many specialists in the colonial and early national periods have withdrawn, as the field itself has gravitated toward the more recent past and the present. The ASA ought to be a natural locus for the rich conversation among specialists in many periods and many social science and humanities disciplines around conceptions like the "extended Caribbean," or reckoning the stakes of "the global South" for the study of the United States. We seek to re-engage the insight and energy of early Americanists across the disciplines. A high value will be placed on papers and sessions that touch upon aspects of pre-1865 history and culture, panels that span different periods in thematic or comparative perspective, and panels that challenge standard categories of periodization -- colonial, early national, antebellum -- in the light of a truly transnational perspective. In recent years, "empire" has become an increasingly complicated word in the US political lexicon -- openly and quite positively embraced in some quarters in the early years of the Iraq War, and now increasingly discussed -- also openly, even amid ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya -- as something that is quite evidently at its end, as in "the fall of the American empire" or "the end of the American Century." Even Time magazine recently announced on its cover, "Yes, America Is in Decline." Both meanings seem to be integrally embedded within and conveyed by a text like The Wire, for instance, and there is much to explore here from an interdisciplinary perspective. By "present and future," then, we mean to provoke discussion of these complexities as they affect the peoples both within and without the United States. The behaviors of neoliberal states are crucial here -- the shift, as Phillip Bobbitt puts it, from the "nation-state" to the "market-state" -- as are the ways in which the corporation has displaced the state as the most significant aggregation of power in many hemispheric or regional contests and has displaced the citizen in many local ones. These developments, though traceable to the longer trajectories of "empire," have begun to unite the working people of Michigan and Wisconsin with the working people of San Juan in new and unforeseen ways. The Caribbean vantage point of the 2012 conference is also a compelling invitation to rethink or reinterpret the United States' geopolitical strategies and discourses, both historically and in the future, and to reckon with artistic and literary work that has been devoted to reimagining the boundaries of utopianism and futurity. |
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