History & Past Conferences

Program Committee Reflection

The 2019 Annual Meeting played a critical role in the ongoing development of the American Studies Association as a site for transformative thinking and forms of collectivity that transcend academic conventions. Our theme, “Build as We Fight,” sought to capture the urgency of this historical moment, characterized dialectically by catastrophic threats to all living things and an upsurge of movement activism. We celebrated the best America Studies has to offer but remained humbled by the sobering tasks before us. A truly diverse grouping of scholars, artists, and organizers answered our call for presentations and workshops to help guide resistance to the destructive, genocidal effects of this rotting system, while acknowledging the imperative to create alternative means of survival and models of community. In total, the meeting featured 2,384 presenters across 520 sessions.

As we set about our conference planning, the importance of our meeting locale in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi stood at the forefront of our collective consciousness. Our Site Resource Committee provided invaluable expertise and local knowledge from dedicated Kanaka Maoli scholar/activists and allies. We sought to highlight the vital ways that Kanaka Maoli epistemology and Indigenous social movements for land, water, and resource justice inform the most cutting-edge work in American Studies and model practice for the future of our field. A powerful, soul-stirring example was set by the opening plenary on the contemporary struggle to uphold Hawaiian sovereignty and protect Mauna a Wākea from desecration in the form of a 30-meter telescope. Situating this struggle in relation to a long and ongoing history of settler colonialism and resistance, the panel brought together the best of academic research on the subject with the stories, lessons, and songs of the kia‘i who have gathered to protect the mauna from the dicatates of monied interests and colonial science. It was an unforgettable and pivotal moment in the history of the ASA that was thankfully captured on video.

The Site Resource Committee (SRC) made a deliberate move to offer politically and culturally rich excursions, or huakaʻi, that operated within the framework of decolonization, and against the often touristic way that Hawai‘i is positioned as a destination. Through huakaʻi focused on gentrification, plantation life, university activism, demilitarization, the palace grounds, and a traditional fishing village; through panels featuring poetry and music as well as more traditional papers; and through the introduction of a zine workshop, and booths for community organizations, the SRC worked to highlight the productive tensions of the conference theme, the conference’s location in occupied lands, and the emergent political resurgence in Hawai‘i. Its members embodied the legacy of Haunani-Kay Trask, who received the Angela Y. Davis Prize for public scholarship as part of a moving awards ceremony.

The members of the Program Committee brought an added range of awareness of Indigeneity, race, and intersectionality that was reflected in an exciting blend of sponsored sessions, such as “Disability and Empire” and “Food Justice,” speaking to the conference theme and site. “Climate Justice and Decolonial Perspectives” exemplified the emphasis at the heart of our meeting on Indigenous approaches to issues of environmental crisis. We brought the past, present, and future of struggle into dialogue through sessions like “1969/2019: Radical Visions, Transformative Movements.” We recognized the ASA’s guiding lights with roundtables on “Intersectionality and Critical Race Theory” (featuring Kimberlé Crenshaw and Mari Matsuda) and “Decolonizing Methodologies” (featuring Linda Tuhiwai Smith). We paid tribute to ancestors Toni Morrison, Paul Lyons, and Patsy Mink.

Through workshops and roundtables on “radical labor organizing,” “the contingent majority,” “confronting white nationalism,” “fighting racial containment,” “doing public scholarship,” “anti-fascist pedagogies,” and “comparative archipelagos,” we stressed the importance of critical solidarities and the construction of “constellations of coresistance” (citing Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson). We partnered with the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture, and Design for a thought-provoking session on American Muslims and “Art in Times of Crisis.” A heightened presence of international scholars, particularly from the Pacific and Asia, further enhanced our meeting. We were honored to welcome speakers from Palestine for conversations with Hawaiian storytellers on “Decolonial Love” and “Resurgent Solidarities.”

Drawing inspiration from the radical scholarship that has remade the ASA as site of “antidisciplinarity,” Scott Kurashige’s presidential address sought to capture the danger and opportunity inherent in a historical moment predicated on the collapse of liberalism and a refusual of the politics of recognition within and beyond academia. Kurashige’s focus on models of social transformation from the ground up was amplified by a theme session inspired by James and Grace Lee Boggs and the dynamic presence of the ASA’s 2019 Artist-in-Residence, adrienne maree brown from Detroit. An internationally reknowned organizer, facilitator, and author, brown electrified participants with interactive workshops based on her books, Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism, combining radical visioning and practical organizing tools with life-affirming, sex-positive models of pleasure and self-care.

In our efforts to “walk the talk” of radical transformation, we sought to pilot new measures and guidelines to promote universal access and enhance the climate of our meeting for participants from historically marginalized and underrepresented backgrounds. Parelleling the Baxter Travel Grant for graduate students, we offered travel stipends and free registration for 40 contingent faculty, community-based scholars, and undergraduates with support from donations to the ASA Solidarity Fund. We augmented our budget to make ASL interpretation standard on prioritized sessions, and we arranged professional, on-site childcare available at sliding scale rates. We made special efforts to construct panels from individual paper submissions, as we know this is often a first step for members who are new to the ASA and not part of existing social networks within our organization. We were encouraged to see multiple sessions comprising the Organizing Track to advance struggles and movements bridging the campus and community. Furthrmore, we opened all Sunday sessions to the public with free registration, while promoting special tracks on Indigenous Resurgence and Speculative Fiction. Because the ASAʻs institutional policy and climate significantly shapes the conditions of knowledge production in our field, we hope and expect that future meetings will build on these initiatives.

Finally, we would be remiss if we did not emphasize that none of this would be possible without the tireless efforts and timely support from numerous people and organizations. Our sponsors included University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (Provost’s Office, the College of Arts and Humanities, the College of Languages, Linguistics & Literature, the College of Social Sciences, and the Department of American Studies), University of Washington (Office of Faculty Advancement, Indigenous Wellness Research Institute, UW Bothell Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, and Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies), and Pratt Institute (Global South Center).

The unique features of the 2019 Annual Meeting are a testament to the dedicated work and critical vision of the Program Committee Co-Chairs (Hōkūlani K. Aikau, Macarena Gómez-Barris, and David Palumbo-Liu) and Members (Jessica Cowing, Jaskiran Dhillon, Elizabeth Esch, Laura Sachiko Fugikawa, Sarita Gaytan, Christina Hanhardt, Samir Meghilli, Judy Rohrer, and Lynnell Thomas); Site Resource Committee Co-chairs (Vernadette Gonzalez, Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, and ‘Ilima Long) and Members (Kealani Cook, Cynthia Franklin, Candace Fujikane, Noelle Kahanu, Halena Kapuni-Reynolds, and Karen K. Kosasa); ASA staff and Office of the Executive Director (Brienne Adams, Deborah Kimmey, Kelsey Michael, and John Stephens); and the voluntary labor of countless members, students, and friends. We are all building the ASA together.

Program Committee Reflection

The 2018 American Studies meeting not only evoked the year’s thematic interactions of emergencies and emergences, it also provoked conversations about the living and heterogeneous histories of the conference’s location and the field of American Studies. Notably, the programming drew on the rich intellectual and political histories of the city and the state. To begin with, the fact that the meetings happened simultaneously with those of the National Women’s Studies Association invoked the histories of Atlanta as a site of black radical formations that were internationalist, queer, and feminist. NWSA and ASA members attended and participated on panels at both conferences, creating a synergy that was both historical and historic. Moreover, there were panels commemorating the history of black lesbian feminist activism within the city of Black women’s resilience in the face of Georgia’s convict leasing system in the Jim Crow era, tours of the archival collections at Spelman College, and sessions assessing the role of Atlanta as a music capital. Recognizing the ways in which Atlanta and Georgia cannot be simply pressed into a black/white binary, a site-committee session also addressed the city as the home of Latinx communities and struggles over immigration.

Several of the sessions addressed the current moment of state restrictions by the U.S. The panel “Travel Bans and Border Walls: The Weaponization of Foreignness in the State of Racial Emergency” included some engaged and timely papers by junior scholars. Each of those papers considered how the Trump era stigmatizes foreignness as a means of mobilizing white antagonism. Also, the panel by the Marxism Caucus on the “Marxism, the University, and Legacies of 1968” included a number of fantastic papers that observed how the various struggles that made of 1968 come to bear on the contemporary campus activism.

There were also several sessions organized around the celebration of new books and the commemoration of previously published ones. Three of those were program committee panels that highlighted Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Sara Haley’s No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity, Nikhil Pal Singh’s Race and and America’s Long War, and Sherene Razack’s Casting Out: Race and the Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics. All of these panels were moving and at the same time deeply engaged in the theory, method, and practice of American Studies.

One of the major highlights of the meeting was the work presented by that year’s artist-in-residence LeAnne Howe. Howe is the author of novels, plays, poetry, screenplays, and scholarship that deal with Native experiences. A citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma some of her awards include: the Western Literature Association’s 2015 Distinguished Achievement Award for her body of work; the inaugural 2014 MLA Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures; a 2012 United States Artists Ford Fellowship; a 2010 Fulbright Scholarship to Jordan; and an American Book Award in 2002 for her first novel, Shell Shaker. Howe read her poetry about American Indian removal at the reception for lifetime members. She followed that reading with a reading from her upcoming novel Savage Conversations, a fictionalized tale about Mary Todd Lincoln’s actual nightmares about a Native American man who’s trying to murder her. Both readings were ways to engage the histories of Georgia and the U.S. as settler colonies and as the producers of a racial and settler unconscious that makes Native Americans central to those histories.       

Howe’s poetry reading prefaced Roderick A. Ferguson’s presidential address, “To Catch a Light­Filled Vision: American Studies and the Activation of Radical Traditions.” The talk brought together the importance of our site and the region of the South while addressing some of the most significant issues in the field. It drew upon Ferguson’s own family history in Georgia to identify the insurgent possibilities of an intellectualism not arising from an urban Northern cosmopolitanism, but rooted in the supposedly “savage” and “backward” soil of the rural US South. Grounding his intellectualism in the thinking, theorizing, and creative expression of his mother, aunts, grandparents, church community, high school classmates and teachers, and many others, Ferguson described working class rural Black communities as a powerful and fertile source of complex theoretical engagements. The talk helped to mark a longstanding American Studies’ investment in exploring intellectual and political formations from below.

President:  Roderick Ferguson, University of Illinois, Chicago
Co-Chair: Avery Gordon, University of California, Santa Barbara
Co-Chair: Grace Kyungwon Hong, University of California, Los Angeles
Co-Chair: Junaid Rana, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Program Committee Reflection

As the site and occasion of this year’s conference, Chicago and its robust local histories of activism did everything to offer a welcoming place for collaborative rehearsal–not without debate and disagreement and laughter–as to what pedagogies of dissent can look, feel, and sound like.  The time and place of the conference provided an important space of relief for many to be able to do their work: to exchange ideas and conversation with others, to work in company and not isolation, to find the resolute joy in times of despair.  Important historical work was taken up. Actions of past and present, both major and minor, were set down for the collective record. We were given close readings of dissent’s actual mechanics—decisions ordinary and grand—about what people do to make where they are better.  Many participants pushed their work beyond conventional forms and approaches to craft novel observations that refused to be paralyzed by the current conditions of struggle.

While many participants took up the conference theme to offer a wide range of work about dissent, the program’s featured artists, activists, teachers, scholars, and archivists encouraged linking models for doing dissent.  And they did so even when they couldn’t be physically present.  Musicians brought their experiences to bear on recordings we can take up and revisit at any time, people no longer with us in body made strong imprints in spirit with the visions of justice they left behind, and absent comrades here and abroad palpably inspired the annual meeting this year. 

Some memories linger large.  A filled-to-capacity session on the Combahee River Collective Statement brought forward the comradery and commitment that enduringly describes the central role of Black women’s theorizing and organizing to the critique of racism, patriarchy, and capitalism; the young actors of the Albany Park Theatre Project, our Artist-in-Residence, compellingly showed us how casually cruel, racialized immigration policies and capitalist practices of abandonment of communities are made manifest in the lives of real people; the teach-in “Breaking the ‘ICE’” demonstrated how courageous, creative acts of resistance on the part of student Dreamers and their faculty allies could emerge from intensified vulnerability; sessions focused on anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and fascism powerfully demanded that we collectively work harder to undo the ignorance sustaining these ideologies and their subtending structures; undergraduate student participants spoke insightfully of the intellectual and social experiences that brought them to American studies; the Dissent Mixtape multiplied the sounds of protest, resistance, refusal, and rage; union members from Chicago public schools and several Illinois colleges and universities led a “teach-in” on how we might organize across institutions to build stronger alliances in the face of ongoing assaults, especially on public education, at all levels; and, a standing-room-only crowd both celebrated and critically engaged the continuing salience of Cathy Cohen’s “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens,” on its twentieth anniversary.  All of this vital instruction reminds the Association of the long view.

Amidst this energizing array, several events gave us a chance to venture out of the conference hotel and into some of the distinctive institutions and neighborhoods of Chicago.  The Newberry Library generously co-sponsored a reception and session on “The Secret Life of Indigenous Archives,” where renowned scholars of indigenous studies reflected brilliantly on the archival encounters at the center of their research, emphasizing the ambivalences, disappointments, intimacies, and creative responses particular to the pursuit of indigenous histories in the face of colonial violence, both in the past and the present. Guided tours of the Chicago neighborhoods of Argyle, Bronzeville, and Pilsen highlighted the importance of public art as a form of community activism and place-making especially for people of color in the city, and reminded all of us of the intimate link between creativity and dissent, and between aesthetics and politics. 

We cannot recount everything that made “Pedagogies of Dissent” come to life as the full-blown, invigorating annual meeting that it was, and expect that everyone who attended will have their own points of emphasis.  Perhaps, finally, what remains with us is the collective and collaborative ethos that was everywhere present — in the work, thought, conversation, commiseration, celebration, and mourning, we did together.  We are truly grateful to everyone who organized, attended, committed time and money and effort, and in all of these and other ways made this annual meeting and indeed, make the association possible. With our hope that the energies of the conference continue to generate new ways of enacting and thinking about both pedagogy and dissent, we look forward to the conversations that await us in Atlanta and beyond.

Laura Kang
Siobhan Somerville
Alexandra T. Vazquez

Program Committee Co-Chairs

Program Committee Reflection

The most extraordinary and unique feature of the 2016 ASA annual meeting was undoubtedly the US presidential election that took place the week before we gathered in Denver. A Clinton victory would have prompted its own sort of reckoning at our meeting, but the Trump victory created an altogether different level of cognitive, intellectual, and psycho-social consternation for the American studies scholars who gathered at the foot of the Rocky Mountains November 17-20.

To hazard a guess on what will be remembered most about ASA Denver 2016, I would offer the suggestion that we learned while still in the immediacy of the election’s results that our gathered strength, shared consideration, and collective attention is a powerful resource for comprehending and analyzing the new and shifting realities now upon us and that our annual meeting is an invaluable site of collaboration, witness, and, yes, reckoning.

Among many treasured moments for me personally will be the end of the presidential address, when the Denver Singers, a local Northern Plains drum group, led us in a blanket dance during which we collected money to send to those at the meeting who were heading to Standing Rock and the water protector camps alongside the Missouri River. Our round dance around the perimeter of the Centennial Ballroom at the Hyatt Regency served as a rousing reminder of how deep and how long the arc of history is that we engage as American studies scholars, and how we can embody the music and movement of that arc in our work.

In the short interregnum between US election day and the start of the Denver meeting several new panels and events came together, including jam-packed sessions featuring election analysis by Keeanga-Yahmahtta Taylor, Moustafa Bayoumi, Lisa Duggan, and Joanne Barker and an emergency meeting convened by Jason Ruiz that focused on the role of college campuses in the movement to provide sanctuary to those now targeted for deportation and other forms of anti-immigrant repression.

Those sessions provided a remarkable sense of the intellectual power of our association in seeking to get ahead of the waves of history now breaking on our shores. Perhaps even more remarkable, though, was the resonance of the program that had taken form months and months before election day in the US. Indeed, the collective sensibility that gathered and grew in Denver is a testament to those who responded to the call for proposals with so many compelling sessions and papers on critical prison studies, sexuality, indigeneity, race, gender, class, and other topics that demonstrate the breadth of scholarship those of us in ASA represent.

Several of those sessions are available in video format, and I encourage you to edify yourselves through those recordings, especially if you were not able to attend. These include sessions that commemorated the contributions of Prince (featuring Greg Tate, Steven Thrasher, Daphne Brooks, Scott Paulson Bryant, Nicole Fleetwood, Josh Kun, and Andreana Clay), Cedric Robinson (with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Erica Edwards, Christina Heatherton, and Avery Gordon), and Patrick Wolfe (featuring Robin D.G. Kelley, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Jean O’Brien, Saree Makdisi, and David Lloyd), each of which is stunning in its own way and well worth watching. What’s perhaps most remarkable about these sessions and the ones already mentioned that we added at the last minute is that these all-star lineups of incredible scholars were drawn from our existing membership. All of which goes to say that the work of American studies as we practice it now is the scholarship that is already responding to the precarious present. That is why we gather and why coming together to share our work is so vitally important.

Sincere thanks and endless gratitude are due the 2016 program committee and it co-chairs, who worked incredibly hard to shepherd a collection of sessions and papers that performed beautifully under the unique stresses of the meeting and its context. Sharon Holland, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, and Jean O’Brien provided incredible leadership to a wonderful committee made up of Maria Cotera, Kevin Murphy, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Richard Rodriguez, Nicole Fleetwood,  Alex Lubin, Rebecca Hill, Cynthia Franklin, and Susan Stryker. Together, we relearned a lesson that every program committee learns, which is that the great strength of American studies as reflected in our association is the amazing membership of the ASA. On behalf of the co-chairs and the committee, I want to thank all of you who helped make ASA Denver 2016 such a memorable and consequential success.

Robert Warrior, President, American Studies Association

Program Committee Reflection

Our gathering in Toronto for the 2015 ASA was born of a deep acknowledgment of ongoing violences as well as the long traditions and new innovations that move a world in struggle. We came to this year’s conference possessed of the knowledge of Black teenager Michael Brown, an Indigenous movement known as Idle No More, and the stakes of the claim “Soy Dominicano.” The conference theme, “The (Re)Production of Misery and the Ways of Resistance,” provided various angles and ports of entry for us as American Studies scholars to consider the ways in which chronic conditions of injustice can and do give rise to fighting back and breaking through within and beyond the Americas. Across four days and scores of sessions, the ASA investigated, interrogated, finessed, and critiqued these conditions as products of social and political economies, reminding us that misery remains a product of our social, political, and economic world.

Interrogations of the theme naturally took aim at the exposition and critique of the structures and methods that enforce widespread dispossession, alienation, and death. Entrenched definitions of genocide, for example, were troubled through examinations that extended its application into the practices of policing, incarceration, and aid. Evaluations of contemporary global settler colonialism, appropriative labor, and biopolitics oriented our sightlines and methods of investigation into the darker and poorer populations of the world and illuminated the ways in which these people grow darker and poorer with every coming administration, war, and disaster. In addition to these miserable conditions, critical questions were brought to bear on the organizing themes and keywords of our sociopolitical past, present, and futures. In his presidential address David Roediger compelled the audience to consider what and whom “solidarity” leaves out and whose absence it is premised upon. This challenge to the very nature of what we know of our progressive movement past or present is not the undermining of them but rather the necessary concern that must animate any steps toward a collective future.

The seriousness of the aforementioned realities did not calcify or stifle the types of engagements had amongst conference participants. It is telling that, even within the framework of misery, so much joy was experienced and expressed this year. Indeed, this too is resistance. We laughed at the sardonic brilliance of comedian Aamer Rahman, reveled in the creations of Erykah Badu, and entered wide-eyed into the speculative worlds of fiction. We heard, saw (and, dare we, felt?) the suciedad of queer socialities, imagined new methods of interaction and identification outside of the state, and boldly encountered the calculated risk involved in the creation of new pedagogies. We celebrated together—the authors, the mentors, students, and colleagues without whom we would not think as we think or know as we know. We lovingly (re)animated some of the many thinkers gone, including James Baldwin, whose wisdom inspired more than one session. And, perhaps most importantly, we dreamed of new conditions and projects, the ends of which we expect to see in the not too distant future.

Toronto was an excellent site for the meeting, providing not only a delectable mix of peoples but also cuisines, histories, and points of entry and exit. Toronto is a hangout in a way no big city in the United States can boast, but that vibe is part of a productive, serious space too close to U.S. borders to elude juxtaposition. For many of us traveling from the States, its sameness and difference provide a respite from the onslaught of the branded America that is our quotidian reality. A worldly city of old and new immigrants, Toronto is also an ancient redoubt of Indigenous presence and African refuge. Our investment in engaging in meaningful exchanges beyond the conference site was made possible through the exceptional work of our local colleagues. The Site Resources Committee connected us to the city in astoundingly thoughtful ways. Their events focused on how the themes of misery and resistance, together, inform the historically present spaces of Toronto. ASA members were introduced to Black and Indigenous geographies, sonic walks, the city’s green spaces, collaborative events with activists, local union members, and graduate students, and a range of creative works at galleries and museums. Far from auxiliary, these events served to ground us in a moment and at the place from which we might imagine anew our relationship to the world in which we live, love, work, and play.

As a bellwether of American Studies scholarship, we recognize the American Studies Association as not simply an intellectual formation but also an opportunity. We as Program Committee co-chairs were incredibly gratified at the program’s range of ideas, analyses, registers, and methodologies. We’re proud of the work accomplished and thank you for your commitment to sharing with us in this urgent project.

Jennifer L. Pierce, Shana L. Redmond, and Robert Warrior

Program Committee Reflection

The 2014 annual meeting in Los Angeles, “The Fun and the Fury: New Dialectics of Pleasure and Pain in the Post-American Century,” was an attempt to come together around other terms, to place even the existing terms by which most of us organize ourselves and our work under the kind of pressure that would let us see how much or how little those terms are really ours. The pressure was experimental and was driven by a desire for pleasure, even in the face of the things that oppress and infuriate us, precisely because a general opening and cultivation of our capacity to please and to be pleased is what we want. We put pressure on these terms by using and, sometimes, abusing them, critically, but also with a sense of abandon and even, sometimes, with the intent to abandon them. Even unguarded usage of terms such as “we” and “ours” was encouraged if only so that they could be more brought more sharply and insistently into critical relief. If everything “we” hope for is, in some sense, grounded in an assumption of a shared generality the only way to protect that ground is by digging into it, investigating as furiously as possible the very foundations and possibility of “our” collectivity.

There could have been no more appropriate place than Los Angeles, which bears the historical traces of U.S. imperial expansion and new internationalization marked as much by the transgression as by the proliferation of borders, to explore the production of desire, the experience of abundance and deprivation, the affective, discursive and material structures subtending both oppression and the joy and pain that attend the resistance to oppression. “The Fun and the Fury” was a vast collective experiment in new forms and modalities of collective study and Los Angeles was the laboratory for analyzing and experiencing the constant disruptions and innovations of the striated totality of American social, political, economic and cultural life. Rather than L.A. standing for all that is inimical to the making and dispersal of casual, random and intense sociality, L.A. was in fact a space that upheld the communities that formed under the various conference headings and created more. ASA this year was home to theater productions, conventional panels, rants, raves, elegies and soliloquies. People rose to the challenge, took the bait, drank and made merry.

The conference organizers and, especially, the site-resource committee forged lines of dispersal throughout the city, making contact with Los Angeles’ diverse range of artistic, activist and intellectual communities, while inside the Bonaventure Hotel itself new structures of academic and counter-academic address were conceived and attempted, some renewing the most basic forms of good old fashioned social contact, others taking full, and hopefully subversive advantage of new technological capacities to gather virtually, all in the interest of forging a range of new orientations within that famously disorienting space.

In the production and performance of “soap-box manifestos,” in the murder and resuscitation of key words, in a Presidential Address that made use of a “silly archive” and put queer feelings front and center, in a proliferation of non-traditional presentations that aggressively attempted to blur the lines between panelists and audience, the conference was bent on refreshing our collectivity by putting pressure on the assumptions that undergird it. This was especially emphatic and appropriate at the culmination of a year that had brought grossly premature pronouncements of the death of the ASA in the wake of its decision, after spirited debate at the 2013 annual meeting in Washington D.C., to boycott Israeli academic and cultural institutions complicit in the occupation of Palestine. Last year’s conference continued that debate with a series of panels featuring scholars from all over the world addressing the global history of colonial practice and attempting to refine and extend anti-colonial theory and activism.

If controversy over the proper place and modality of academic activism constituted a major part of what animated the 2014 annual meeting, mourning the loss of José Esteban Muñoz and celebrating his life and brilliance were also essential to what animated the conference. As Lisa Duggan eloquently put it in her presidential address, “The fun and the fury of mourning José, celebrating his work and each other as well as raging at mortality, did come to overlap with the fun and the fury of responding to both the enormous joy that created the boycott vote, as well as with the considerable dissent and rage over that vote in multiple arenas.” Despite his untimely passing in December 2013, Muñoz was the conference’s presiding spirit. There is no more auspicious meeting of fun and fury than in his body of work. Muñoz was co-chair of the planning committee for this conference and his brilliant enthusiasm and ideas, as well as all the rich lessons in innovative intellectual practice gleaned from ASA annual meetings over the past two decades were the impetus for a range of attempts to form a different kind of atmosphere, one built on his firm belief that “‘our current situation is not enough, that something is indeed missing and we cannot live without it’” (qtd. in Lisa Duggan, Presidential Address).

Fred Moten, Jack Halberstam, Sandra K. Soto

Program Committee Reflection

The 2013 meeting in Washington DC, “Beyond the Logic of Debt:  Toward an Ethics of Collective Dissent,” brought our focus on the ramifications of “debt” – financial, social, political, environmental, affective – to the nation’s capitol.  It was a richly productive program that engaged “debt” in manifold ways.  From the home foreclosures of the subprime mortgage crisis to the financialization of social life, from the debts incurred by histories of slavery, racial capitalism and anti-blackness to those of settler colonialism, native dispossession, and military occupation – the conference program reflected on the nation’s past, present, and future.  Sessions explored debt in relation to the restructuring of education, the prison industry, and national sovereignty, while others mined the logic of debt as obligation, inheritance, pedagogy, and responsibility.  A broad variety of disciplines and interdisciplinary fields were represented:  history, sociology, political science, anthropology, literary and cultural studies, music, and art history, as well as critical race and ethnic studies, indigenous studies, Black studies, Latino studies, feminist and queer studies, and disability studies.  Sessions included a suggestive, original mix of methods, approaches, and orientations, as well as engagements and conversations that crossed disciplines, generations, geographies, and historical periods.  A brief sampling of the intellectually provocative interpretations of debt threaded through the program includes:  the “American dream” deferred, food justice and sustainability, debt and diasporas, military colonial debts, sex work and trafficking, memory work and borrowed time, present destruction and the unpaid future, the “balance sheet” of racial struggle, the afterlives of civil rights, debt and U.S. Cold War “liberation.”  Yet other discussions explored the question of the “ethics of collective dissent” to such debt regimes, and imagined a range of alternatives to debt that includes: nonpayment and refusing debts, deficits and “failures,” being in the “red,” returning debt, spectacularizing debt, and the creation of new attachments, commons, and accumulations.

The location of the conference was itself significant, and the program committee assembled various site-specific panels that were organized not only to familiarize members with Washington D.C.‘s rich history but also to retheorize that history in relation to the theme of debt.  For instance, there were presentations on how activists responded and continue to respond to the policing of sex in the district, how gentrification has reshaped neighborhoods and communities within D.C., and how the foreclosure crisis has become a site of mobilization and contestation among D.C. residents. With site-specific panels such as these, the 2013 program provided a model of how to use an “economic” theme to recast local histories of race, sexuality, and gender.

In addition, the conference became fertile ground for contemplating debt in relation to histories of devaluation and dispossession. For instance, the three-part panel series on “Economies of Dispossession” used the theme to consider the different effects and agendas of racial capitalism—from how financialization operates as a system of valuation and devaluation for social groups, determining which communities are racialized for the expansion of life and opportunity and which groups are racialized in the service of that expansion and in the direction of social death. As a reflection on racial capitalism’s links to settler colonialism, the panel also analyzed how histories of land dispossession and the resulting disfranchisement of indigenous communities produces genealogies of debt for and to those communities. 

Exploring debt as an invocation of intellectual genealogy, the panel “The Burden of Our Genealogies: Intellection, Indebtedness, and American Studies” brought together American Studies scholars in African American, Asian American, Latino, Performance, Gender, and Native American Studies to address the intellectual formations, traditions, and genealogies to which the present ASA is indebted. As a theoretical exercise the panel was a way to clarify the critical foundations that make up the association’s current diversity. Panelists invoked “debt” as a mode of subjection and agency, a sense that American Studies scholarship represents a negotiation with the disabling and enabling legacies of critical formations around race, gender, sexuality, and indigeneity.

In pursuit of artistic representations of debt, the ASA artist in residence was Ricardo Dominguez, one of the co-founders of the Electronic Disturbance Theater and a theorist and practitioner of “virtual sit ins.” For the convention he organized the Disturbance Research Lab (DRL), providing training on how to create an “electronic disturbance,” launching Debt Strike, a digital exhibition of net art projects focused on data-driven manifestations and the question of debt, and presented Unexpected Interfaces, a techno-event that fell between “flash crash” cultures and the promissory algorithms of past social debts unmet.

In his presidential address “Seeing in the Red: Looking at Student Debt,” Curtis Marez oriented our critical attentions to the contemporary “university of debt,” framing it as “a form of racialized and gendered settler colonial capitalism” based on the exploitation of land and labor.  In doing so, he outlined an “American Studies version of Critical University Studies” that synthesized approaches from critical ethnic studies, indigenous studies, gender and sexuality studies, and visual studies, among other constituencies. Through an “analytic of debt,” Marez critiqued the material conditions of exploitation endemic to the business of the university today, from the staggering levels of student debt that disproportionately entrap students of color to the devaluation of women and young people of color as cheap labor.  At the same time, he exposed debt itself as a form of pedagogy, which ensures student “fidelity to the normative,” limits time for critical thinking and experimentation, and teaches that capitalist rationalities are implacable, natural and benign. Attending closely to dissent on college campuses, from mass student protests against budget cuts to social movements protesting militarism and the Israeli occupation, Marez concluded that what is at stake in all these cases – and in the regime of university debt itself – is the “right to education, or more broadly, what Harney and Moten call ‘study’, a practice of collective thought and social activity irreducible to and, in fact, antagonistic to market logics.” Marez concluded with suggestive examples of how film and visual media provide tools for honing our critical gaze on debt education and its consequences, capacitating critical thinking and action across class and national borders.  In particular, he drew “speculative visions of debt abolition” from Alex Rivera’s film “Sleep Dealer” and Alberto Ledesma’s drawing “Berkeley Dreamers,” offering them as critical projections of paths through new forms of social solidarity to different and better worlds beyond debt.

One of the most provocative sessions from the 2013 meeting was the “ASA Town Hall: The United States and Israel/Palestine,” a town hall designed to inform the membership about one of the iterations of debt—that is, the Israeli nation-state’s indebtedness to U.S. foreign and military aid, an indebtedness that produces conditions of devaluation and social death for Palestinians, in particular. The town hall panel was made up of some of the keenest commentators and scholars of the U.S.‘s relationship to the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Alex Lubin of the University of New Mexico and the American University in Beirut discussed the ways in which the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords allowed the U.S. and Israel to implement systems of neoliberal governance—rather than overt colonialism—in the West Bank and Gaza. Angela Davis, emeritus professor of feminist studies at UC Santa Cruz, offered a critical assessment of how the Israeli occupation is assisted not only by the U.S. nation-state but by corporations such as Caterpillar, Inc. Another panelist, Ahmad H. Sa’di, professor in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University of Negev in Israel, presented archival and historical research that demonstrated the Israeli government’s attempt to manage Palestinian populations during the first two decades of Israel’s founding.

The “ASA Open Discussion: The Israeli Occupation of Palestine,” an event organized by the ASA executive committee, allowed members who were present to discuss a resolution to support the academic boycott of Israeli institutions. There were spirited remarks on both sides of the issue, and the moderators Avery Gordon and Matthew Frye Jacobson concluded the session by congratulating the audience and participants for being able to engage what is a difficult issue for many within and outside the association. 

In sum, the 2013 conference was a truly historic one. The theme of “debt” was one of the first times that the association addressed head-on a category and formation that one typically associates with the field of economics, in particular, and the social sciences in general. Inasmuch as the theme allowed the association to address the transnational expressions and ramifications of debt, the conference can be read as an outgrowth of the association’s long engagement with global processes concerning race, empire, and capital. The meeting was also historic as it occasioned the most sustained deliberation that the association has had on one of the contemporary expressions of race, capital, and empire—that is, the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Ultimately, this deliberation helped to create the conditions for the ASA’s historic resolution calling for the observance of the academic boycott of Israeli institutions. In doing so, this meeting—perhaps like no meeting before it—has allowed the association to promote and broadcast its interest in and commitments to social justice, not only to people within this country but also to people across the globe.

Program Committee Reflection

The San Juan ASA Conference represented an important moment to continue thinking deeply about the conceptual and methodological demands of a truly transnational American Studies.  The location of the conference was itself a powerful call for reflection—reflection on indigeneity and dispossession; reflection on the course of US empire; reflection on rich histories of resistance; reflection on American Studies as a set of interpretive and pedagogical practices in that zone where Indigenous Studies, Atlantic World, Caribbean Studies, Diaspora Studies, and Pacific Rim all come together.  From the outset the Program Committee felt an awesome responsibility to organize sessions and events that would do justice to the significance of this Caribbean locale and its (anti-) colonial history. 

The ASA membership responded to the call and the challenges of the conference with terrific energy, innovation, insight, commitment, and with a spirit of true collaboration and intellectual generosity.  This was one of the best-attended and most vibrant ASA meetings in recent memory.  The program was expanded in order to accommodate as many of the very fine submissions as possible; the final program comprised over 400 panels, round tables, caucus meetings, screenings, readings, lightening rounds, and installations, involving the participation of over 1500 scholars, writers, artists, and activists from 25 countries in North and Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific, the Middle East, and Europe.  Sessions represented a vast and ingenious array of methods, approaches, and orientations, as well as scholarly and politically committed conversations that ambitiously crossed disciplines, geographic regions, and historical periods.  A brief sampling of the interpretive modalities and the intellectual concerns running through the program includes comparative empires, US regions/cities in the context of empire, the Puerto Rican diaspora, empire and migration, political economy, activism and public scholarship, liberalism (in both its broad and narrower meanings), legal structures and juridical discourses, public pedagogy, transnational activism, the carceral state, neoliberalism, militarism and state violence, biopolitics, hegemonic and alternative archives, tourism, commodity chains, settler colonialism, borderlands, cartography, indigeneity and anti-imperialist strategies, digital humanities, consumption and the commercial cultures of empire, religion as oppression and as resistance, oral history, missionaries and explorers, feminist internationalism, environmental justice, sexuality and imperial power, global health, hemispheric solidarities, the politics of water, the global South and the “resource curse,” radical poetics, human rights discourse, photography as a technology of empire, modernities and modernisms, museums and curation, sonic landscapes, narco-empire, graphic novels and animation, race and real estate, and trauma. 

This was a tremendously rich, varied, and productive program.  Among the most meaningful of the many conversations enabled at the meeting were those between colleagues from different parts of the world, between Puerto Rican scholars and activists and their colleagues from the US, between scholars in the humanities and in the social sciences, and between early Americanists and their colleagues who work on later periods.  The program committee worked especially hard to raise the profile of early America in the conference and to invigorate the conversations across the temporal spectrum from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first.

The committee likewise assembled a slate of extracurricular exhibits, screenings, and events meant to augment and anchor the anti-imperialist spirit of the conference agenda and to provide routes into San Juan and its history quite distinct from those laid out by the normal circuitry of tourism.  These included tours of the Hacienda La Esperanza Nature Reserve, one of the largest sugar plantations in Puerto Rico in the latter half of the nineteenth century; historical tours of Viejo San Juan, led by Edwin Quiles Rodríguez, author of San Juan Tras la Fachada: Una Mirada Desde Sus Espacios Ocultos (1580-1900); and a tour of the ENLACE Caño Martín Peña Project, whose residents seek to overcome poverty and attain social and environmental justice.  Special events also included a reading by Puerto Rican poet and writer Giannina Braschi, whose work explores themes of US-Caribbean relations, the politics of empire and independence, and the migrant’s experience of marginality and liberation; and installations by two artists-in-residence:  Nao Bustamante presented her multimedia project, Personal Protection, which activates the tactile and tactical histories of women in wa; and Adál Maldonado presented his multi-media project, Blueprints for a Nation:  Construction of an Imaginary State, weaving diverse perspectives on the Puerto Rican Diaspora, the significance of creative expression in fostering new political imaginations, and the subversive tropicalization of new environments.  All of these events were heavily attended and enthusiastically received.

Finally, an in-house Anti-Imperialist Film Festival provided continuous screenings of important documentary films.  These included Roberto Clemente, followed by a discussion with director Bernardo Ruiz; Aquel Rebaño Azul [The Blue Herd], a historical account of police brutality in Puerto Rico, sponsored by Puerto Rico’s Civil Rights Commission; Más de 800 Razones, on the 2010-2011 University of Puerto Rico student strikes; and a number of films provided by the feminist collective, Women Make Movies.  The festival culminated in a screening and director’s discussion of John Sayle’s Amigo, on a Philippine baryo in the crossfire of empire and resistance, and a ragtag but lethal detachment of U.S. soldiers who find themselves halfway around the world walking point for their country’s new imperialist policy in 1899. 

The strength, vitality, and rich programming regarding Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans, the Caribbean, and the Americas created a larger space from which to theorize, reflect upon, and produce knowledge that advances our understanding of the consequences of empire.  The inclusion of local scholars from the Island, the participation of former Puerto Rican political prisoners, and the performances of Bustamante and Maldonado were particularly important.  ASA members came away from San Juan having taken serious stock of the voluminous and electrifying interdisciplinary work that has recently been produced on empire, but also with a new, deeper charge to expand on conversations that cross disciplines, national boundaries, and period-specific specializations.  Most agreed that this was an energizing and important set of meetings.

Program Committee Reflection

It is with pleasure that we submit this final report of the 2011 Program Committee. Entitled “Imagination, Reparation, Transformation,” the Baltimore, Maryland meeting succeeded in bringing together scholars from a wide array of disciplines and perspectives, using diverse methodologies and focusing on a range of topics.  is meeting ranked among the most well attended meetings in ASA history.  ere were 1900 registrants for the 2011 meeting: a 17% increase over the 2010 meeting in San Antonio, Texas (1575 registrants), yet somewhat less than the 2009 meeting in Washington, DC (1975 registrants).

As we reported last June, scholars in the ASA community responded to this “key word” themed meeting with utmost creativity.  is enthusiastic response resulted in an excellent, dynamic meeting that reflected both the longstanding commitments and emergent interests of our membership. Running through and across these panels were analyses of race and racism, ethnicity, and gender and sexuality, in their multiple permutations. It is clear from the strong showing of panels in these areas that issues of pedagogy and university politics remain important in the field. Continuing a precedent set in recent years, the meeting’s formats were diverse and included traditional paper presentations as well as film screenings, local tours, roundtables, workshops, and performances.

As in the recent past, many panels addressed issues of diaspora, citizenship, migration and immigration, labor and working class studies, aesthetics and the arts, genre, the archive, mass and popular culture and religious studies. “The Roots and Routes of Black Feminist Criticism” and “Black Visual Culture: Visuality, Blackness, and the Arts” had standing room only audiences. Also very well attended were the Early Americanist sessions (e.g., “Early American Biopolitics,” “Media Transformation in Early America,” and “Race and Creolization in the Early American Archive”); these streams of panels for a period that is often represented at the meeting were scheduled so that they would not con ict. In keeping with a longstanding ASA tradition, an assortment of presentations took the meeting’s location as a source of inspiration, including “Through the Wire’: A Roundtable, A Post-Mortem,” “Musical Lives and Imaginaries in B’more and the Chocolate City,” and “Baltimore City as Laboratory: Transformations of Urban Neighborhoods through Public History Programming.”

A number of panels took up urgent social and political issues; of note were critical perspectives on US military expansion, American empire, and hyper-incarceration. Notably, many of these sessions brought new perspectives to well established concerns of the ASA community including “Security Practices: War, Torture and Surveillance in the Global Circuits of US Exceptionalism,” “War and the Intimate: Deployments of Gender in the US Military,” and “War and the Environment.” Carrying forward a focus of the 2010 meeting, panels examining the prison-industrial complex were well represented and robustly attended.  ese included a stream of four panels organized by the Critical Prison Studies Caucus that focused primarily on the US as well as panels that took an international view to mass incarceration such as “Prisons and Palestine.”  e strong presence of work on visual culture and environmental studies reflected the successful community- building of these respective caucuses and the fact that these interests are moving into the center of American Studies scholarship.

In addition to attending to contemporary debates, some of the panels also pointed to burgeoning interests among ASA scholars, including the digital humanities, the arts, science and technology studies, sociology, anthropology, environmental justice, sonic and auditory cultures, political science and policy, and critical legal studies. Exciting new areas of focus were also evident at the 2011 meeting in panels such as “The Intersection of Queer and Indigenous Studies,” “Afrofuturism,” “The Labor of Digital Production,” “Queer Transnational Intimacies and Imaginaries,” and “Academic and Community Activism” that look at longstanding concerns of the field through novel prisms. This was also the case with Priscilla Wald’s stellar presidential address. In her reading of the experiences of Henrietta Lacks, she seamlessly brought together fields not often imbricated— including literary studies, the health sciences, and social theory—demonstrating the rigorous interdisciplinarity that is the hallmark of American Studies scholarship. Wald’s lecture was a clarion call for a critical humanism that put the tools of feminist analysis, ethnic studies and bioethics in the service of agency, liberty and transformation.

In conclusion, we wish to express our profuse thanks to the 2011 Program Committee for their dedication and collegiality: Shona Jackson, Melani McAlister, Leigh Raiford, Mark Rifkin, Julie Sze, Gregory Tomso, Penny von Eschen, Priscilla Wald, and Elliott Young. We thank Gerry Canavan, Amy Noelle, Rogers Hays, Luke Jackson, and Gabriel Peoples for their exceptional organizational skills, hard work and good spirit; Zita Nunes, chair, and the rest of the members of the site resource committee for their rich, creative program and for their hard work in making it all happen, and of course the incomparable John Stephens, the Executive Director and guiding spirit of the ASA. 

Program Committee Reflection

We are pleased to offer this final report of the 2009 program committee.  We were fortunate to have had the opportunity to meet in Washington D.C., where the conference theme of “Practices of Citizenship, Sustainability and Belonging” resonated powerfully with the membership, resulting in an exciting, memorable, and well-attended conference. There were 1975 registrants for the 2009 Annual Meeting, one of the two largest meetings in ASA history (the other being 1997 in Washington DC) and continuing to build on our largest meetings outside of DC (Hartford 2003, Atlanta 2004, Oakland 2006, Philadelphia 2007, and Albuquerque 2008). 

As we mentioned in our interim report, ASA scholars responded with great creativity to the theme and its interlocking concepts, producing a diverse and wide-ranging program that advanced the interventions of ASA scholars in recent years, including critical intersectional approaches to race, belonging, empire, citizenship, and the salience of categories of class, sexuality, and the visual for all of these areas.  The American Quarterly editorial board held three panels organized around the theme “Between Life and Death: Race, Social Death, Necropolitics, Disposability” which reflected our sense that the triangulation of sustainability with citizenship and belonging raised issues of human needs, security and natural resources as fundamental political questions.  Indeed, “sustainability” generated an impressive number of panels in Environmental Studies, which we had hoped to accomplish. We were pleased to see a number of panels on food and foodways, as well.  The conflict between participatory democracy and neoliberalism, and its effects both in the U.S. and abroad, was much in evidence.  Many of the conference sessions powerfully confronted the moment of crisis, and yet the engagement and high quality of presentations seemed to generate a spirit of excitement. 

As we had hoped, the theme and the location of the meeting in the nation’s capitol helped attract a substantial number of scholars from the social sciences, including politcal science, communications, geography, and sociology, many of which have methodological and intellectual affinities with the humanities disciplines that are traditionally strong at ASA. The location in DC also facilitated participation by public sector and public policy researchers and activists, including Jaime Grant of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force who provided an important overview of GLBT issues at the “GLBT Policy and Movement Building After Proposition 8” panel.  We hope that this trend will continue, with as wide a representation of academic disciplines, fields, and analytics, public policy and independent scholars, journalists, and community activists as possible at future ASA meetings. 

Along with the usually well-represented fields of ethnic studies, media studies, gender and sexuality studies and African American studies, the program boasted a stronger than usual presence of panels in early American and nineteenth century studies.  And there were exciting panels in many other areas, including religion, disability studies, working class studies, postcolonial studies, public practice/scholarship and museum studies, and visual culture studies.  International scholars had a robust presence on the program, with such sessions as Practices of Community and Belonging: Teaching Graphic Narratives in a Post-9/11 World.  Our hopes of increasing the number of panels in which international scholars are in dialogue with U.S.-based presenters achieved modest results.  We hope the ASA membership and future program committees will continue this most welcome trend of increasing collaboration across national boundaries within sessions.

The program featured several featured sessions in response to ongoing political crises. Having done its work during a turbulent period marked by a historic election campaign, and more ominously, the repeal of same sex marriage in California by referendum, the onset of the Great Recession, as well as the continuing chaos of wars of occupation, suicide attacks, and instability in the Middle East and the South Asian subcontinent, and the deepening crisis in public higher education, culminating in mass protests on University of California campuses in the early fall, the program committee organized or highlighted sessions that addressed current political and social states of siege.  Featured sessions were also held in honor of the recently deceased past ASA presidents John Hope Franklin and Emory Elliott (In this elegiac vein there was also a session around the work of Studs Terkel). These moving and informative panels provided an occasion for those in attendance to reflect on the past and reaffirm some of the ASA’s recent priorities and initiatives, including fostering scholarship committed to social justice, promoting open-ended dialogue among scholars across international boundaries, and forging partnerships with K-16 educators, cultural institutions, and public advocacy organizations.

We were extremely fortunate to collaborate with the National Museum of the American Indian, which generously hosted the ASA welcome reception in its beautiful facility.  When not mingling with colleagues in the museum’s rotunda, those in attendance explored the museum’s exhibits, including one featuring the artist Brian Jungen. At the reception, Kevin Gaines presented on behalf of ASA an award for “Distinguished Public Service” to Mary Frances Berry, former Chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and one of the founding members of the Free South Africa Movement during the 1980s.  The Visual Culture Caucus also took advantage of the cultural resources of Washington by holding its sponsored events in the National Portrait Gallery.

Among several featured sessions, there were two panels organized by the program committee on Palestine, “Palestine in Crisis” focused on the various pressures facing educational institutions in Gaza and the West Bank. “Academic Freedom and the Right to Education: The Question of Palestine” explored the ways in which ASA citizen-scholars might become involved in political organzing and education about Palestine. In addition, there were several sessions more broadly concerned with U.S.-Middle East relations, an important instance of the “transnational turn” in American Studies.

The program committee also organized a session in response to the death of Michael Jackson that examined his transformative role in modes of musical performance, the music industry, global flows of popular culture and U.S. race politics. In addition, the program featured a panel and reception marking the 50th anniversary of American Quarterly.  On behalf of the ASA membership we offer our warmest thanks to Curtis Marez, who edited the journal for the last 5 years, and whose vision and leadership has made AQ one of the best and most vibrant academic journals in the country.  Starting in July of 2010, the new editor will be Sarah Banet-Weiser.

In conclusion, we wish to thank the members of the program committee for their diligence and collegiality which lightened the workload over an unseasonably warm March weekend in DC:  Luis Alvarez, Devon Carbado, Angela Dillard, Natalia Molina, Kelly Quinn, Robert Reid-Pharr, Sarita See, and Robert Vitalis. Our labors were eased by the support and guidance of ASA staff, Zachary Gardner, Barry McCarron and Gabriel Peoples, and to them we express our gratitude. Finally, it has been a pleasure to work with John Stevens, the Executive Director of the ASA, whose vast expertise and institutional memory provided a indispensable foundation for the work of the program committee in all of its phases.

Joanna Brooks, Melani McAlister, and Barry Shank

Program Committee Reflection

The 2008 ASA Annual Meeting brought scholars from the broad range of American studies scholarship “back down to the crossroads.” Papers, performances, screenings, tours, roundtables, workshops, and other events provided an opportunity to reflect on the many pathways that we as an association have traveled in the past decade. Phil Deloria, who presided over the meeting, called us to that reflection, and ASA members responded through an excellent set of scholarly interventions.

Hanging over the meeting was a growing sense of crisis as financial institutions in the US and around the world were collapsing. Indeed, a significant number of people cancelled due to fiscal constraints their home institutions were putting in place. Since the foundation grants that have previously subsidized the participation of international scholars from areas other than Asia ran out in 2008, the impact of the spreading recession was sharply felt.

At the same time, many at the meeting expressed hope for political change on the eve of the US presidential election that was then just weeks away. Indeed, ASA president Phil Deloria, in the version of the presidential address that he submitted to American Quarterly on November 7, declared his closing paragraphs the most rewritten in ASA history, as he strove to keep up with political and economic events. The address, which will appear in the next issue of AQ, was a reflection on questions of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in a rapidly shifting social and political world. It generated significant conversation and debate, including a lively rejoinder from Nikhil Pal Singh, a co-chair of this committee. Thus, our meeting recognized the stakes of a United States in flux and took place as a sort of microcosm of the world our field seeks to understand.

Looking back over the program, it’s clear that our association has become one that values and highlights cross-cultural, transnational, global versions of American studies even as we also have cemented the critical study of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality into our agenda. To the extent that the subject index of the program tells us anything, it’s clear that these are the main roads that now cross at our annual meeting.

The verbs in session titles point vividly to the discourses of change and challenge, of positioning and craft that Deloria also surveyed in his thoughtful keynote address. Conference participants were “recasting,” “reexamining,” “reframing,” “remapping,” and coloring “outside the lines,” even as they were “hearing,” “negotiating,” “theorizing,” “visualizing,” “crossing,” and “self-locating.” Presenters were a dialogic bunch, “engaging exception”  “thinking with W.E.B. Du Bois at the Crossroads of Theory and Practice,” “Troubling Citizenship,” and tracking “clashes and alliances.” 

Many participants heeded the program statement and responded by, indeed, “Thinking Big about American Studies: From Case Studies to Field Imaginaries,” as one session title proclaimed.  An ambitious sequence of panels on Race, Sex, Class took on “Theories in American Studies,” meditating reflexively upon the keywords and analytical frames that have become the fundaments of our interdisciplinary practice.

Ambitious linkages appeared in significant “ands”: “Political Theory and American Studies at the crossroads”; “Sacred/Secular Crossroads and Conundrums”; “Teaching Politics and the Politics of Teaching” and, at a Breakfast Forum sponsored by the Students’ Committee and the Ethnic Studies Committee, “The Future of American and Ethnic Studies.” “Places of Critical Thinking” focused on gender and sexuality; another session looked at “Queer Studies, Media Studies.” But the largest number of sessions characterized by this kind of relational, comparative, or intersectional discourse (at least according to the program’s subject index) remains global, transnational, and inter-cultural studies. Thus, we seem as a whole to remain focused on the ways in which American refers not only to a country, but to a hemisphere and to ideas, ideologies, and goods that travel all across  the globe.

The emphasis on environmental studies and indigeneity in the Program Statement inspired strong sessions in both areas, as well as striking linkages between the two (e.g., “Race, Nature, and Nation at the Crossroads,” “Listening to the Land: At the Crossroads of Ecofeminism, Transnationalism, and Native American Studies,” and “Challenging Ecocriticism: New Directions for the Study of Literature and Environment”). One panel focused on “Positioning Native America with/in American Studies,” while a series on “Alternative Contact” examined “Race and Indigeneity in Hawai’i,” “Contesting American (Indian) Lands and Nations,” and “Mixed-Race Indigeneity.”

It is clear that environmental studies, cultural geography, and work on landscape and the built environment are emerging concentrations within the field. Attention to locality, space, and place is part of what is driving this expanding intellectual enterprise. Likewise, the study of food and foodways attracts broad and growing interest. In this context, it’s worth nothing that this is the first ASA conference for which participants could purchase carbon offsets when registering online.

Amidst all the growth and maturation, we find it important to note the continuing under-representation and conceptualization of the social sciences within ASA—indeed, while writing this final report we revisited the astute analysis of this question in the final conference report of 1998, a decade ago. Nonetheless, the methodologies of mapping and ethnography, in particular, are clearly migrating from geography and anthropology to the humanities, performance practice, and community-based scholarship and creative work. We wonder what a larger number of scholars with expertise in social science methods might bring to our shared work.

Our meeting took place in Albuquerque for the first time, and the brilliant light and tonic air of the city enhanced the event immensely. Many ASA conference participants visited Old Town and the Albuquerque Museum in order to view Albuquerque’s geographic and temporal crossroads, where Route 66 intersects with El Camino Real, where the Santa Fe Railroad intersects with the Santa Fe Trail. New Mexico is a transnational crossroads with an international border four hours south and inter-national borders with Isleta, Laguna, and Sandia Pueblos within a few miles west, north and south.

More than the setting, though, the work of Alex Lubin and members of the Site Resources Committee he chaired provided a wonderful set of local events that showed off various sides of Albuquerque. South of downtown is the National Hispanic Cultural Center, located in the historic Barelas neighborhood. Conference attendees, including a lively group of colleagues from Taiwan, converged on the NHCC for a sizzling art exhibit by the De La Torre Brothers, “Meso-Americhanics (Maneuvering Mestizaje),” whose work yielded the powerful image on the 2008 Convention Program. A lively accompanying exhibition explored “Border Baroque.” As the NHCC’s program aptly put it,

Einar and Jamex de la Torre are a two-man bi-national renaissance. While the brothers travel back and forth between National City, California and Ensenada, Mexico on a weekly basis, they have been called Mexican, American, Californian, Chicano, and Latino…. They translate their creative passion and critical thinking into intensely collaborative, opulent and monumental blown glass “mix” media works. And, even though their art constantly addresses and questions complex issues, they love a joke, a visual pun, hidden symbols, and wordplay. For the de la Torre Brothers nothing – and everything – is sacred including politics, religion, tradition, and geographical location.

This high-energy evening concluded with a performance by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, “El Mexorist 2 – America’s Most Wanted Inner Demon.” The performance was part of the NHCC’s regular performing arts series calendar, and thus brought together ASA visitors with local audiences. 

The Environment and Culture Caucus and Early America Matters Caucus joined the Site Film night at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, which featured a reception of Pueblo-inspired foods and short films by emerging Native filmmakers, drew over seventy people. Chris Wilson, the J.B. Jackson Professor of Cultural Landscape Studies at UNM, led a walking tour of downtown.

On Sunday, October 19, conference attendees who stayed in Albuquerque after the official close of the conference took a day trip of the Acoma Pueblo, said to be the longest inhabited community in North America. Acoma is a one-hour drive west of Albuquerque and contains a new history and cultural center, as well as Acoma’s original settlement, or “sky city.” 

Several other performances and readings took place onsite, including Jeffrey Q. McCune performing his show, “SeeSaw” and Laura Tohe reading from her new opera and Diane Glancy reading from her new play.

In what is probably a first for ASA, the dance party following the awards ceremony and the Presidential Address featured an open invitation to a Battle of the Bands.  The Leisure of the Theory Class, a band whose members contained both current ASA president Phil Deloria and incoming president Kevin Gaines, kicked off the cut-loose part of the evening.

Co-chairing the Program Committee was a terrific opportunity to grab hold of the energies of our association and be propelled by our collective scholarly and intellectual power. We offer gracious thanks to Phil Deloria for his leadership, keen ear, and musicality, and for giving the three of us the chance to work together; to John Stephens and the ASA staff (especially outgoing conference coordinator Kristen Hodge, whom we congratulate on completing her doctorate, and to a spirited, good-humored, and hard-working program committee.

Robert Warrior, Julie Ellison, Nikhil Pal Singh

Program Committee Reflection

It was our distinct privilege to facilitate four days of exchange and collaboration between activists, artists, intellectuals, and colleagues across the disciplines during the 2007 American Studies Association meeting.  The versatility and engagement of those who convened in Philadelphia—not to mention within American Studies and Ethnic Studies more generally—underscored that categories such as “activist,” “artist,” and “scholar” are by no means mutually exclusive.  As Vicki Ruiz stressed during her presidential address, “American Studies Association members participate in a myriad of coalitions.” Still, Ruiz’s call to investigate and unsettle “América Aquí” simultaneously led the Program Committee to seek performances and sessions that innovatively explored the power of knowledge production, creative endeavor, and sociopolitical engagement to reimagine both local and transhemispheric relations.  We not only sought to trouble the all too easy and still prevailing association of “America” with an Anglophone United States.  We also wanted to encourage the pointed interrogation of cultural hegemony, imperial practices, indifference to public health crises, resurgent nativism, and exclusionary visions of citizenship at a time when active collaboration between academics, independent scholars, activists, artists, and broader communities is vital if not imperative. By emphasizing the arts, moreover, we desired to create a program that highlighted the dynamic role of artistic production across time and encouraged new angles of vision on the interdiscipline of American studies itself.

Perhaps it is not surprising that the theme of “América Aquí:  Transhemispheric Visions and Community Connections” generated a markedly high number of submissions on Global, Transnational, and Cross-Cultural Studies.  As program co-chairs, we—Michele Mitchell, María Montoya, and David Román—were delighted that these submissions resulted in over seventy accepted sessions reflecting the range of ASA membership.  Many of these panels, including two that explored how the turn to the transhemispheric either complicates the use of keywords or potentially introduces new ones, featured senior scholars who have pushed American Studies in ever more global directions.  Other panels that fit under a global rubric, notably “Resisting War:  Activism by Soldiers, Veterans, and Military Families,” produced significant dialogues between community activists, independent scholars, and scholars positioned within universities.  Still others, such as “American Studies in Vietnam,” “Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents:  States and Statelessness in the Writings of the Early Republic,” and “The End of the World:  Narratives of Immigration, Border, and Identity in a Global Age,” prominently featured scholars based outside of the United States. The focus on the arts this year additionally resulted in provocative visions of the cross-cultural and transnational in panels exploring borderlands visual culture, popular art and the war on terror, and Indígena performance.

Philadelphia, a city undergoing its own arts renaissance, seemed especially appropriate for our explicit invitation for scholarship on the visual, literary and performing arts.  We were pleased that our call solicited exciting work in these areas as well as innovative programming at local art venues.  Among the most exciting events at this year’s conference were the standing room only back-to back sessions at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts on Thomas Eakins’s celebrated painting, The Gross Clinic.  Scholars, students, curators, and critics packed the auditorium to discuss the history and legacy of this important nineteenth century painting.  We extend our sincere thanks to both Jennifer Doyle and Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw, who coordinated the efforts of many to insure the event’s success.  We were also pleased to produce Coco Fusco’s performance, A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America, at The Painted Bride, an alternative arts organization in downtown Philadelphia.  This performance addressing the role of female interrogators in the War on Terror was preceded by a panel entitled “Retro Coco,” which provided an overview of Fusco’s interdisciplinary career.  We also featured on-site performances by E. Patrick Johnson, a performance scholar/practitioner whose Sweet Tea: An Oral History of Black Gay Men of the South, was especially well-received; Michael Kearns, a Los Angeles-based AIDS activist who read and performed excerpts from his over twenty years of engagement with HIV/AIDS through the arts; and Zoë Strauss, a Philadelphia-based visual artist whose photographic images graced the ASA 2007 Program booklet.  And, thanks to the Site Resources Committee, attendees could enjoy a mural arts tour of the Center City as well.  These events—along with the dozens of panels on music, theatre, dance, performance, photography, film, visual arts, spoken word poetry, and other related art forms—highlighted the significant role of the arts in American history and culture and the necessity of this scholarship in the American Studies Association.

Indeed, Zoë Strauss’s photograph of a restaurant plastered with music advertisements inspired the title of President Vicki Ruiz’s keynote address, “Citizen Restaurant:  American Imaginaries, American Communities.”  A labor historian who has participated in community initiatives throughout her career, Ruiz underscored that armchair activism is never enough as she called for “a renewed emphasis on multi-ethnic civic collaborations” within American Studies programs.  Ruiz did more than detail what needs to happen in the academy when she offered evocative, trenchant commentary on wide-ranging “food fight[s]” that ultimately spring from anti-immigrant impulses.  Given how many restaurants across the United States rely upon immigrant laborers, Ruiz fittingly concluded by imploring us “not to dine on diversity but to dish up social justice.”  Such a reflection on the necessity of sociopolitical engagement spoke powerfully to sessions on this year’s program about immigration debates, citizenship, Ken Burns’s “The War,” the 2008 Presidential election, scholars and public policy, Hurricane Katrina, and the Post-9/11 World.

We accomplished much but there remain areas of concern.  Despite our trans-border calls, Latin America and the Caribbean in and of themselves—not in reference to United States—still do not seem to fit comfortably within most conceptions of American Studies.  We also still do not reach out enough to social sciences, particularly political science, law, and economics, in ways that can foster productive discussion.  While we were pleased with the large number of graduate students and assistant professors who presented engaging work, we note some attendees’ concern that not enough senior scholars were on the program.  On another front, last-minute cancellations compromised some panels and we encourage those who acquire a highly coveted spot on the program to make all efforts to use the privilege. 

Assembling the program was a daunting task at times.  We could not have done it without John Stephens, the amazing ASA staff, and our dedicated program committee, who all worked creatively and cooperatively.  Finally, it has been our pleasure and honor to work with Vicki Ruiz, one of the great mentors and intellects in our field. 

Michele Mitchell, María E. Montoya, and David Román

Program Committee Reflection

The Program Committee for the 2006 ASA Meeting was chaired by Alvina Quintana and co-chaired by Ed Guerrero and Elaine Kim. Committee members included Elspeth Brown, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Kevin Gaines, Avery Gordon, Claire Joysmith, Tiffany Ana Lopez, Jose Munoz, Zita Nunes, Donald Pease, and Dana Takagi. ASA President Emory Elliott worked closely with the Program Committee in all its deliberations. ASA Executive Director John Stephens and the ASA staff, especially Chyann Oliver and  Darcy Kern, as well as Matthew Bowman and Kristen Hodge—were responsible for bringing the elements together for a successful meeting.

The conference theme was “Transnational American Studies.” Altogether, 1706 people registered, including 150 international scholars supported by 40 Mellon Travel Grants. The Program Committee worked hard to encourage the participation of international scholars and to integrate the panels so that instead of being comprised of presenters from the same country, sessions would feature both American and international scholars to the extent possible. Panels, roundtable discussions, and plenaries featured such topics as labor and culture across borders; transnational foodways and food as a performance of transnational identity; theorizing diaspora; transracial adoption and human rights discourse; postnational mixed race; race, genomics, and global health; and transnational waste and pollution. ”Global” aspects of dance, music, religion, and war were considered, as were specific sites of transnational interest, such as in the panel on American Studies and the cultural politics of the Middle East or the panel on U.S. wars in Korea and Vietnam.

Scholars from Asia, Europe, and the Middle East indicated that they felt included and that their work was being acknowledged. A number of them expressed appreciation for the boldness of the President’s keynote address and of the panels that critiqued the kind of ‘institutional amnesia’ of the global past promoted by commercial mass media and state education. One scholar from Asia commented that both the conference sessions and the site tours brought “academics and activism” closer together with “high consciousness…[of] racism and reconstruction of various histories that been forgotten.” By fortunate chance, the ASA meeting dates coincided with celebrations of the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party in Oakland. One of the best-attended and most successful panels at the conference was on the Panthers. This panel was complemented by a town hall style public meeting at the First Unitarian Church on 14th Street, “Challenges to Umoja: Africans and African Americans in Oakland.” Visitors from universities in Europe, Asia, and Africa said they enjoyed and learned a great deal from the tours that were led by Oakland community activists.

The Site Resource Committee, led by Norma Smith, provided an array of excellent activities for conference participants. Smith and her Committee were able to demonstrate the richness of Oakland’s history and the diversity of its communities. Besides the “Challenges to Umoja” program highlights included walking tours of Oakland Chinatown, the Embarcadero, the Port of Oakland led by local community activists. Many scholars from other countries and other U.S. cities joined a walking tour of Gertrude Stein’s Oakland. Off-site events provided ASA with an excellent opportunity to conduct outreach to community members who work beyond the walls of the university. Especially well received was the event at the Intertribal Friendship House, supported by an ASA grant. The event involved successful collaboration between this local Native community-based organization, the ASA, and the regional California ASA. According to Smith, the event attracted a good number of community members. It was important because it acknowledged the issues and concerns of Oakland’s indigenous people.

Although the Intertribal Friendship House session was a success, as was a panel on Native American sovereignty and re-territorialization, some conference participants complained that the relevance of transnational approaches to Native American history and experiences need to be better addressed at ASA meetings. Likewise, at least one international scholar complained that comparative papers showed too little grasp of the non-American culture being discussed. Problems of U.S.-centered imbalance persist, despite all good intentions.

As usual, there were complaints from presenters assigned to Sunday sessions, which were scheduled so that we could accept as many papers as possible. There were requests that the panel titles more closely reflect the papers to be presented, especially since there are by necessity so many concurrent sessions. Perhaps future program committee and ASA staff members could work on this.

A number of participants wished that they could have had a hard copy of the conference program mailed to them in advance as in the past, saying that trying to decide which panels to attend by looking at an online program is very cumbersome. At the same time, printing out the program can be expensive, and when printed out, the Sessions-at-a-Glance features such small print that it is very difficult to read. But the 2006 program book was very accurate and complete. Fully 287 requests for changes to the program book were received by the ASA staff in August 2006, half of which came from people who had changed institutions and needed the accurate institutional listing for travel reimbursement purposes. We were able to make the appropriate changes in time for the conference and provide highly accurate printed programs at the site. We should certainly continue to perfect the online system, but returning to mailed hard copies cannot be an option.

Ed Guerrero, Elaine Kim, Alvina Quintana 

Program Committee Reflection

The co-chairs of the 2005 American Studies Annual convention, Philip J. Deloria, Ann Fabian, and Anthony Lee, are pleased to be able to thank everyone who helped make the meetings in Washington, D.C. so successful.  We appreciate the work of our colleagues on the program committee: Vickie Adamson, Judith Jackson Fossett, William Hart, John Howard, Shannon Jackson, Rafael Perez-Torres, Judith Richardson, Lois Rudnik, and Kent Ryden.  We acknowledge that little would have happened at the conference without the work of ASA executive director John Stephens, convention manager Larry McReynolds, and the ASA staff.  We also appreciate the efforts of members of our site resource committee, Vickie Adamson, Theresa Murphy, Kathleen Steeves, and Ann Fabian.  Thanks to the extraordinary efforts of our president Karen Halttunen the meeting brought new attention to the work of scholars who explore issues in American Studies at all educational levels.

And of course we thank all of you who encouraged us to follow Karen’s lead and think in innovative ways about the conference theme, “Groundwork: Space and Place in American Cultures,” by presenting your own work as text or performance, commenting on the work of colleagues, or recognizing the contributions of the senior scholars whose work has shaped fields in American studies.  The on-line submission process seems to be working well, at long last, and the committee read though an unprecedented xxx proposals for panels and 506 single paper submissions.  Phil Deloria, Karen Halttunen, Kent Ryden, Shannon Jackson, and Judith Jackson Fossett turned those single papers into 51 fine panels.  The ASA’s willingness to encourage individual submissions makes work for program committees, but it helps insure participation of scholars at all professional levels and wide participation makes our meetings diverse and dynamic.  Approximately 2000 scholars, performers, and activists attended the meetings in Washington.  The International Initiative, in its second year, helped assure the presence on the program of scholars from dozens of countries.      

“Groundwork: Space and Place in American Cultures” inspired discussions that employed the many disciplinary models and theoretical approaches that have become a hallmark of American Studies scholarship.  Several panels built on the work of the 2003 and 2004 conventions, exploring questions of war, empire, and the place of American Studies in the Middle East.  This year, we made an effort to include panels on early American history, transnationalism, critical geography, cartography, religion, public scholarship, and environmental studies, and to represent the community-based work of many scholars of American Studies. We were also pleased that several panels brought together scholars and activists interested in the politics and history of Pacific Islands.  The conference theme also prompted us to respond to the late summer devastation on the Gulf Coast, and we invited Yi-Fu Tuan, Keith Wailoo, Danile Taylor, Ari Kelman, Joe Trotter, and Farah Griffin to join a special session on “The Geographies of Hurricane Katrina.”   

We presented roundtables on the work of Hortense Spillers, Yi-Fu Tuan, Gillian Brown, Alan Trachtenberg, Martin Duberman, and Daniel Horowitz.  Participants constructed panels on the 150th anniversary of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and on the 10th anniversary of Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead.  There were panels on keywords in the new Southern Studies and in a Chicana/Latina Lexicon.  There were workshops at the Library of Congress, the National Portrait Gallery, the Building Museum, and the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington, and tours of the war memorials on the Mall, the back alleys of Capitol Hill, and the historic sites of African American Washington. 

We were especially pleased that the Groundwork theme drew geographers to our meeting as never before.  A substantial audience turned out for panels highlighting critical cultural geographies, and spectators enjoyed watching the critical banter of another field, while at the same time engaging its questions and practitioners.  The Washington meeting also attracted scholars concerned with civic engagement.  Sessions such as Undisciplined Public Practice; Politics, Pedagogy, and Public Practice; Going Public; and American Studies Outside the Classroom reminded us how far our work extends beyond the classroom and the campus. 

The K16 collaborative workshops at Ford’s Theater, the Frederick Douglass Historic Site, the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, Maryland, and the National Museum of the American Indian were all well-attended and intellectually provocative events–in part because a number of distinguished ASA scholars were willing to lend their time to this initiative. And the K16 panels held at the conference hotel drew local as well as national K12 teachers and scholars, with a turn-out that the Secondary Education Committee (which has been renamed the K16 Collaboration Committee) proclaimed our best to date.

While continuing the Association’s engagement with the global and international, the 2005 meeting also reminded us of the power of an engaged scholarship of place.  “Get material,” as Karen Halttunen reminded us in her presidential address, was surely one of the important lessons of the meeting, as participants found ample occasion to remember that while the global may sometimes seem “placeless” and abstract, it is also a web of locality, a collection of material locations that requires our attention—analytically, collectively, personally, and pedagogically.  We hope the impulse to return to the ground continues to shape the work of American Studies scholars in the years to come.

Program Committee Reflection

The co-chairs of the 2004 American Studies Annual convention, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, George Sanchez, and Rafia Zafar, again thank everyone who participated in making the meetings in Atlanta, Georgia, such a memorable success.  From the members of the Program Committee, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Shirley Thompson, Estevan Rael-Galvez, Greg Robinson, Craig Howe, Cathy Choy, Joel Dinnerstein, Tiffany Lopez, and Oscar Campomanes, to ASA executive director, John Stephens, convention managers Larry McReynolds and Vanessa Mason, and ASA staff, to our site resource colleagues Pearl McHaney and Christine Levenduski and president Shelley Fisher Fishkin, the 2004 ASA convention was truly a team effort.  We also thank the entire ASA membership for its sterling support, understanding and patience, particularly with the new technologies that the staff had put into place for on-line submissions and drafts of program schedules and information. The convention, together with its deployment of innovative initiatives, owes its successes to you all.

The convention theme, “Crossroads of Cultures”, provided a fertile and capacious venue in which to display the multiple theoretical approaches, disciplinary models, interdisciplinary excursions, and exciting discoveries that have become a hallmark of the American Studies conventions.  While the theme invited a dizzying diversity of presentations, the convention’s panels and sessions visibly traced the dominant intellectual trajectories in American Studies, post Sept. 11th and in the new millennium of U.S. global power and struggles, providing opportunities for fresh interrogations of historical moments and identities in the context of current international politics, new cultural productions under the aegis of critical race theories, and emerging bodies of studies inflected by transnational dynamics, new media, popular culture, and other discursive flows. The shape of the 2004 ASA convention was marked particularly by its location in Atlanta, with Southern regionalism, Black history and identities, Civil Rights history and discourse forming the topics for many panels; by the historical moment, featuring scholarly sessions over US militarism and empire past and present; and by emergent social identities, including ethnic, gender, class, cultural, transnational and globalized operations on multiple identities. The international presence of scholars attracted to the convention through the International Initiative made more emphatic the convention’s simultaneous focus on the cross-roads of the local and the global and the interpenetration of national and international scholarship that had characterized American Studies from its inception and that continues to define its present disciplinary character.

Nearly two thousand scholars converged on the conference site in Atlanta, where participants could choose from the rich assortment of on-site sessions and also explore Atlanta itself, via off-site sessions and other notable excursions, beginning with “Moonlight and Magnolias”, a panel that was held at the Atlanta History Center to much acclaim.  Special sessions, “Expulsions: The Trail of Tears and Beyond”, “The Americas as Crossroads from Prehistory to the Present: Cultural Collisions and National Delusions”, “Same Sex Unions and the Construction of Marriage” and “The U.S.  Abu-Ghraib Continuum:  Torture, Prisons, Militarism, and the Racial State”, each addressed the implicit and explicit social, cultural and historical significance of violent collisions in the on-going formation of the American nation.  Special evening events, such as “Playing Race: Performing and Construing Racial Identity in the Works of William S. Yellow Robe, Jr. and Raul R. Salinas” and the film premiere of “Imagining America: Icons of 20th Century American Art” provided conferees with the opportunity to consider how performance and the visual arts enhance our understanding of crossroads and cultural contact. The Atlanta History Center based session “Not All Moonlight and Magnolias”, offered attendees insight into Atlanta and the South, both contemporary and past. Panels on subjects as widely divergent as southern food, historically black and tribal colleges, science and race in nineteenth century America, and technological consumerism give a tantalizing sense of the diversity and energy generated during the convention.  The convention fielded a record number of sessions, spurred by the boom in proposals fed by easier, on-line submissions and the enthusiastic participation of numerous international scholars from dozens of countries.

November 2004 also marked the Inaugural International Initiative of the ASA.  With scholars from literally dozens of countries in attendance, the association, and with it the interdisciplinary field of American Studies, took on a genuinely global cast.  Sessions of particular interest to our international colleagues were highlighted in the printed program book.  Other special events on behalf of the International Initiative included sessions for editors of international American Studies journals and receptions and meals during which colleagues from around the world could make contact and exchange ideas.

A breakfast meeting highlighted the effervescence of the initiative, for scholars filled a banquet room to capacity, savoring the opportunity to share ideas and news with American Studies colleagues from around the globe.  In Atlanta, the globalization of American Studies went from desired end to actual beginnings.

Another first-time event, ASA’s “Celebration of Authors” was extremely popular.  One hundred and seventy one authors were feted for the recent publications of their books, and enjoyed cake and champagne provided by the association.  Several publishers lent financial support to the celebration as well.  All in attendance praised it as a celebration that should take place at every ASA convention.  The buzz from the “Celebration” doubtless led to the reports from exhibitors of the highest attendance and sales in years.  Many lauded the Celebration of Authors’ event as leading to excellent interactions between conferees, authors, and publishers.

This year, too, marked our organization’s full entry into the internet age.   2004 marked the first year ASA members could submit their proposals online, an initiative perhaps not unrelated to the fact that the convention managers logged in the highest number of proposals ever recorded. Together with the proposals generated by the International Initiative and an increase in international submissions, the number of overall sessions had also to increase—and the number of time slots as well.  (About three-quarters of the pre-constituted session proposals were accepted, while somewhat more than half of individual paper submissions were approved.)  This increase in time slots resulted in trade-offs, however, notably and unfortunately with lower attendance for the earliest panels on the first day.  Yet a decision to return to the smaller number of sessions found in previous years will result in increased competitiveness for the correspondingly fewer number of appearance slots.  One option may be to arrange certain sessions, such as those targeted for program directors and editors of journals, to “pre-convention” slots, as per the practice of other organizations such as the MLA, although careful attention must be paid to weighing the desires of possible attendees with the increased costs (as early morning Thursday panels mean an additional hotel night for many).  With the growth ASA has recently experienced come choices, and the ASA officers and membership will be grappling with decisions of all kinds in the years to come.

We can say, in fact, that the title of 2005 Convention, “Crossroads of Cultures” may in some measure to be overdetermined, for we as a scholarly organization are at a crossroads–of growth, of technological advances, of internationalization–and must carefully move into this newer, larger, more complex venue. Thus, and perhaps paradoxically, ASA’s burgeoning size might temporarily demand a ‘smaller is beautiful’ outlook: we need to consider a variety of ways to keep the energy and close camaraderie of ASA at the same time the association expands on multiple fronts.  If our organization is to continue to provide the collegiality and interdisciplinary leadership upon which so many of us rely, growing pains are inevitable.   And growing pains mean we are heading upwards still.

Program Committee Reflection

Rose Linda Fregoso, Carla Peterson, and David Roediger, the co-chairs of the Program Committee, thank committee members David Eng, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Roberta Hill, Josh Kun, Melani McAlister, Marita Sturken, Leti Volpp, and Laura Wexler for developing an exciting and provocative program at the 2003 ASA.  The committee benefited from an exceptional Site Resources Committee, co-chaired by Lisa MacFarlane and Todd Vogel, who worked in cooperation with the New England American Studies Association to produce superb locally based programming, on- and off- site.  The program’s “Violence and Belonging” theme reflected both the intellectual inspiration and the passion for productive consultation that ASA president Amy Kaplan brought to all of her work with the committee.  The patience, wisdom, and hard work of John Stephens, and of ASA staff members Tina Braxton, Vanessa Mason, Larry McReynolds, and Aaron Palmer made it possible to sort through the hundreds of proposals and to present 196 full sessions, forty of them assembled from individual paper proposals by a subcommittee under Carla Peterson’s creative direction.

The capacious theme of “violence and belonging” produced a great variety of programming, examining issues of war, empire, migration, race relations, the nation-state, incarceration, and repression in a wide range of arenas such as politics, society, art, popular culture, and the media.  Conceived at a time when the Iraq war was looming, the theme took on special urgency by the time of the conference when paradoxically military operations were said to be “over” but the country was still quite obviously at war.  Two major conference sessions directly addressed these current events.  In her presidential address “Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today,” Amy Kaplan examined the current permutations of American Empire—military intervention abroad, security for the homeland—and its meanings for the field of American Studies today.  The later plenary session “The State of War,” featuring Ruth Gilmore, Tariq Ali, Judith Butler, and Michael Berube, extended these themes and provided a model of spirited and provocative exchange among the speakers and the audience.

Beyond providing a forum for specific discussion of the Iraq war, the theme “violence and belonging” provided a coherent intellectual focus and framework for the conference as a whole.  Conversation and debate took place in both the more traditional panel sessions as well as new presentation formats, including two “talk format” panels, an online discussion, nine roundtables, and sessions featuring artistic performances and opportunities to her influential American Studies professionals working outside academia.   Some of the panels referred to other global conflicts taking place today and the relation of the U.S. to them; particularly noteworthy in this regard was the session “American Jews, Israel, and the Palestinian Question,” and the two Arab/Arab-American Feminist Roundtables, “The Enemy Within: Nation, War, and Belonging,” and “Spaces of Empowerment, Communities of Resistance?”   Other panels served as sober reminders of the nation’s all-too-long history of violence.  From this perspective, several sessions revisited earlier periods of U.S. imperialism such as the Philippines and Vietnam wars.  Others looked at the ways in which our borders have historically served as contested sites of violence and belonging.   Still others examined more “local” instances of violence, whether against queer students in schools, non-white populations in urban settings, or women in the home.

The city of Hartford provided an excellent backdrop for the conference.  Attendees did note some problems with the venue, which we hope can be avoided at future meetings—most especially, the difficulty of getting from one hotel to another, the poor acoustics at the Convention Center, and the inaccessibility of the book exhibit.  But collaboration with many of Hartford’s illustrious cultural institutions greatly enhanced the meeting: a discussion of the nineteenth-century literary community Nook Farm at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House; sessions of the collection of fine and decorative arts at the Wadsworth Atheneum, and a workshop on bringing material cultural and literary studies together at the Mark Twain House.

The Program Committee is proud of a most successful 2003 conference and thanks the Association for the opportunity to help shape the event and to work with the ASA staff and one another.

Program Committee Reflection

The program committee co-chairs, Robert Lee, T.V. Reed, and Sonia Saldívar-Hull, appreciate the hard work done by the committee members who collaborated to make the conference a success: Rick Bonus, Kandace Chuh, Janet Davis, Jonathan Holloway, Matthew Frye Jacobson, Joanne Melish, Laura Pulido, John-Michael Rivera, and Robert Warrior. ASA president Stephen Sumida provided the vision that led us to our theme and showed us that it is possible to include new visions of the program and still ensure the full participation of the multiple approaches to American Studies that our organization provides. We are grateful to John Stephens and the ASA office staff, especially Vanessa Mason, convention coordinator, who supported us through the whole process of program preparation and made the conference itself flow smoothly. The Site Committee for the 2002 meeting, José Aranda, Nicolas Kanellos, and Lorenzo Thomas, also merit special recognition for going beyond the traditional duties of site committees as they organized the groundbreaking collaboration of the ASA meeting with the Recovery of the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Project conference.  The 2002 program committee is proud of how the conference theme, The Local and The Global, was reflected in this unique experiment.

The conference explored a variety of local, global and local perspectives, and drew richly on scholarship and scholars exploring national, transnational and postnational issues. ASA President Steven Sumida’s address richly presented the variety of scholarship on the US from around the world, and challenged members to explore more fully this body of work that pushes the borders of American studies.

The 2002 Program committee took to heart the recommendation of its predecessor to “continue to promote a diversity of voices at the conferences, including both older and younger members of the profession, geographical and international variety, as well as the dazzling range of scholarly fields that now align themselves with American Studies.” While the setting led to a number of jokes on a theme of being “malled,” sitting the conference in the heart of consumerdom contained reminders of our inevitable imbrication in capitalism and reminded participants vividly of current class divides. The collaboration between the American Studies Association and the Seventh Conference of Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage provided opportunities for us to bridge the local and the global with multiple border crossings at the conference and the potential for new networks. The Recovery Conference theme, “Redefining ‘Nuestra Ameríca’: A Transnational Perspective on the Local and the Global” reflected the multiple intersections with our own project. As José Aranda so eloquently put it: “Our goal is to present the evolving significance of the ‘local and the global’ for Latinos/as as represented, debated, and contested in writings from the 1500s to 1960. We in the Recovery Project look forward to not only sharing with you the findings of an enterprise now into its second decade, but also inviting you to think out loud about how our findings might affect your field of interests and vice versa.”           

We count the 2002 Conference a great success. The program included a record number of sessions. Attendance was excellent for a non-coastal year with more than 1400 participants and thanks to the hard work of the support staff the program ran exceedingly smoothly.  With the exception of the usual small number of no-shows and the few complaints from those whose sessions or papers could not be accommodated, the general consensus of the participants was positive. This annual meeting showed how the American Studies Association continues to grow in response to a changing and dynamic field. 

Program Committee Reflection

This year’s conference occurred in the aftermath of the horrific attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the war in Afghanistan and became an occasion for reflection and dialogue about the consequences of those events.   The Program Committee recognizes the determination of all of our American Studies colleagues from around the country and the globe who came to Washington, despite difficulties of travel in the wake of September 11.  We particularly appreciate how thoughtfully conference presenters and audiences of both planned and specially scheduled sessions engaged the complicated, provocative, and painful realities created by this critical new phase of our national and international life.

More than 2000 people registered and attended this year’s conference.  The participants could choose from two hundred and sixteen sessions.  Only six scheduled panels were officially canceled, most frequently because of travel complications.  This year’s annual meeting was one of the most widely attended in the history of the American Studies Association.

The conference theme, “Multiple Publics/Civic Voices,” resonated deeply with the diversity of perspectives and interpretive approaches in the program.  It was, for instance, reflected by an unusually large number of collaborative presentations by faculty, independent scholars, and public sector practitioners.  The special forum on the War and its Consequences created an extraordinary moment for reflection and re-commitment to the intellectual challenges of responding to violence and intolerance and working towards peace. The spirit of creative community engagement was carried forward by the compelling evening of performance by artist/activists Arthur Aviles and his Bronx-based dance company and theater artist Rhodessa Jones and her work with incarcerated women.  And it was articulated with inspiration in George Sanchez’ Presidential Address,  “Working at the Crossroads:  American Studies for the 21st Century,” which re-examined successful previous coalitions as a basis for new models for American Studies inquiry and methodologies to find real-world applications in the cultural and racial crossroads of our local communities and neighborhoods.

The 2001 conference in Washington D.C. was also the backdrop for several new and related ASA initiatives.  The new Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize, recognizing the work and life of our valued colleague who died in 1997, is now in place to acknowledge outstanding scholarship that highlights intersections of race with gender, class, sexuality, and/or nation.  The Baxter Travel Grants have been established to facilitate members’ encouragement and subsidizing of graduate student participation in future programs.  And the Sakakibara Prize includes a cash award for the best conference paper presented by an international scholar. A new ASA Task Force on Public Practice has been established to address ways ASA can support colleagues who work or plan to work in public practice and to identify models and mentors to support graduate students who will seek careers outside academia.  Additionally and significantly, at the Washington conference the newly established Performance Caucus held its first business meeting and joint reception with the Music of the Americas Caucus.  Next year, these two groups will for the first time put out a collaborative call for papers based on the 2002 theme, “The Local and the Global,” and develop jointly sponsored panel proposals.

Overall, the conference’s focus on diversifying American Studies’ sense of its own identity and priorities to connect more effectively with our multiple “publics” could not have come at a more appropriate moment. In a time of stress, the conference sustained spirited and dynamic dialogues about citizenship, democracy, violence, gender and sexual politics,  cultural difference, nationality and nationalism in the present and in the past. The panels offered vivid examples of how to engage multiple publics around the world and in each of our own local communities.  The Program Committee is grateful to all those-ASA officers, staff, members, and colleagues-who contributed to an extraordinarily successful meeting at this charged and difficult American season.

Program Committee Reflection

Putting on a successful program – as we did! – is a collaborative effort, and I and the other  program committee co-chairs, Brenda Dixon-Gottschild and Neil Foley, want to begin by thanking the committee members who worked together to create an exciting and useful program for ASA members: Ebele Amali, John Caughey, Nan Enstad, Betsy Erkkila, Nora Faires, Guenter Lenz, Mae M. Ngai, Deborah Schmalholz, Shirley Wajda, and S. Craig Watkins.   ASA President Michael Frisch, committed to interlinking the academy and the community, provided the vision that led us to our theme “American Studies in the World/The World in American Studies” and buoyed us all with his energy and optimism. We are indebted to John Stephens and the ASA office staff, especially Larry McReynolds, convention coordinator, who offered us both the wisdom of tradition and the support for innovation, as well as countless unseen hours of hard work to make the convention run smoothly.  (You come to understand and appreciate the efficiency of the American Studies Association Executive Director and staff in the process of working on the annual meeting.)

Special thanks this year go to the co-chairs of the Local Arrangments Committee, Linda Borish, Nora Faires, and Sheila Lloyd, who, along with Michael Frisch, put time, imagination, and patience into organizing the Pre-Convention Collaboratives, which allowed ASA members to meet with members of community groups and organizations.   

In our call for papers, we expressed our hope that the conference would draw on the range of disciplines and interdisciplines that traditionally constitute American Studies, as well as opening room for areas new or under-represented at ASA, like music, Native American Studies, and early American studies; that it would cross the boundaries between the academy and the “real” world of social and economic challenge; that it would place American Studies in a global perspective.  Looking at the x sessions that constitute the formal program, it is clear that we succeeded in shaping a program that achieved these goals, as well as reflecting the range of interests and methods in our still-evolving field.  What is even more satisfying is the fact that most individual sessions mingled different methods and approaches, so that interdisciplinary conversations and juxtapositions were constantly taking place.  One typical session featured presenters from departments of communications, international politics, English and journalism, and film studies; another drew from art history, cultural studies, and theater studies; a third from ethnic studies, anthropology, and religion.  Some of the sessions on ethnic studies focussed on one ethnic group, but featured presenters from different disciplines and backgrounds, like “Chicana/o and Latina/o Spiritualities: Negotiating Multiple Identities, Faiths and Practices,” whose presenters came from departments of comparative ethnic studies, women’s studies, religious studies, and American and Chicano studies.  Other sessions on race and ethnicity were doing comparative work, like the “Reading Diasporas” sessions that juxtaposed the African Diaspora in the United States and Brazil, or the two sessions on “Performing Ethnicity.”

It’s this mix of different voices and approaches on the same panel that makes the ASA annual meeting so invigorating and freeing: it’s a space where people can take the risk of doing new work, finding support from the people they encounter to develop different methods and explore new kinds of sources.   Session reports from ASA chairs stressed the high levels of dialogue that took place, finding an congenial atmosphere for interchanging ideas that at times extended beyond the session (not, admittedly, into the nearby cocktail lounge, the absence of which several of you mentioned.)  These comments on the chairs’ response forms are typical:   “Several members of the audience got in touch with me after the session in order to establish further exchanges of information.”  “The strong feeling of collaborative inquiry in this session was both invigorating and refreshing.”  “The commentator delivered a really supportive and brilliant comment that helped all three panelists take their work deeper.”

We had wanted to create a conference in which such exchanges could take place among academics and non-academics, and we are particularly glad that ASA members who organized session proposals did such extensive outreach, bringing us panels that intermingled scholars and college teachers with non-profit directors, print and media journalists, public historians, film-makers, social activists, secondary school teachers, labor organizers, government workers, community organizers, poets, and performers. 

We introduced some innovations in format to facilitate this kind of democratic cross-fertilization: “talk” sessions, in which the presenter speaks rather than reads a paper (although the written paper has been sent ahead of time to the chair and commentator); an exhibit format; an on-line format.   The feedback on these changes, which can allow for more interaction between presenter and audience, was extremely positive, and we hope that future program committees build on this base.  (Many of you felt that in a future conference you might plunge and try a “talk” presentation, and so it’s likely that this alternative format — quite easy to arrange — could become more common.) 

President Michael Frisch, along with the Local Arrangements Committee, provided the leadership and energy for another innovation that we hope future program committees will build on — Pre-Convention Collaboratives, which provided the opportunity for ASA members to meet with community activists, journalists, museum professionals, historic preservation specialists, civil rights leaders and local artists in small, focussed workshops.  These collaboratives stressed the importance of Detroit, making the city more than a setting  — in fact, an active participant in our conference. They also gave ASA members a concrete way to dissolve the barrier between classroom and community and embrace the local, and those who attended found the workshops valuable.  Some fine-tuning needs to be done here — many of you said it was difficult to arrive in time for a pre-convention slot, and another program committee might want to simply interweave these workshops with regular sessions, and perhaps to offer fewer workshops than we did for this initial venture.  But certainly these collaboratives helped to make the connection between our conference and the city of Detroit more meaningful, as did the several regular program sessions on Detroit history, culture, politics, and activism and the “community commons” accompanying the reception at the Diego Rivera court of the Detroit Museum of Art. 

Last year’s Program Committee had made a commitment to integrating performance with the conference, featuring five performers over the three main conference days.  We took a different approach this year, deciding to devote three performance time slots and a major part of our modest budget to one performer, Jawole Willa Joe Zollar, choreographer and dancer and founder of the performance ensemble Urban Bush Women, dedicated to interconnecting performance and social change. This decision had the advantage of bringing us a gifted artist-in-residence who was present at the conference over a three-day period; a possible disadvantage for future program committees was the fact that booking a performer of this stature requires committing money that is then unavailable for other uses, such as offering travel assistance for non-academics who are participating in the conference.  We believe that the artist-in-residence idea is still worth exploring, however, particularly if the ways in which the artist will connect to the membership can become more substantial.  Perhaps linking a resident artist or performer with an already established structure – such as the “Focus on Teaching Day” – would ensure that enough people would benefit from the residency to make the financial commitment an acceptable cost. Certainly many of our members appreciate the presence of performers and artists at the conference who provide an alternative to academic sessions and allow us to think about the connections between the arts and social change.

The feedback that program committee co-chairs and members heard from the more than 1,500 ASA members attending the Detroit conference was overwhelmingly positive, and we find that very gratifying. Yes, there were a few grumbles.  Some sessions were under-attended, particularly those at unattractive meeting times like Thursday noon and Sunday morning.  We know it is dispiriting to have prepared a paper and then find only three people in the audience, one of whom discovers, as soon as you begin to talk, that he’s in the wrong session and walks out. But the only way we can continue to offer X sessions and so have a healthy acceptance rate for proposals is to use Thursday and Sunday for sessions. Some chairs’ responses pointed out problems with what we can call “conference etiquette” – people disrupting sessions by their comings and goings (hard to control this one), panelists and commentators and chairs dropping out at the last minute, at times without giving a reason, without informing anyone, and without finding replacements.  “This is not acceptable behavior,” wrote one session chair in his report. “Perhaps such transgressors should not be allowed to be on the program for a year.”  I find myself agreeing, momentarily transformed into ASA’s Miss Manners, and forward the problem to next year’s committee.

And, yes, there was our under-construction hotel (or “bunker”), toward which some of you turned a critical eye.  Taking a larger and more interdisciplinary perspective, we can see the – unusual? – environment of the Renaissance Center as a decided positive.  The lack of food and drink sent resourceful ASA members out into the restaurants and bars of Detroit, creating a meaningful relationship with the city, as we had intended all along.  And the maze-like hotel setting served to spark the metaphor-making creativity of conference goers (“fort,” “moonscape,” “something out of Blade Runner”) and allowed lost and wandering ASA-ers to interact with local people when they asked for directions.

I attended my first American Studies meeting in Boston, over 25 years ago.  The 2000 annual meeting was, in some ways, very different, reflecting the exciting new directions in scholarship and teaching we have seen over the last two decades – I’m thinking in particular of the new work in ethnic and race studies, the “crossing borders” perspectives that place the United States in a global context and view America as an entity always in the process of construction, and the impact that cultural studies, women’s studies, African-American studies, queer studies, and performance studies have had on the profession.  But the essence of the meeting was the same as that of the long-ago Boston meeting, which drew me to ASA: throughout the conference one could see the importance our association has traditionally placed on egalitarian practices, on respectful and supportive interchange, on innovation, on social and economic responsibility, and on welcoming junior scholars into the profession.   Our organization and the annual meeting provide a strong home base from which to continue our challenging interdisciplinary and intellectual journeys.

Sharon O’Brien

Program Committee Reflection

The program committee co-chairs, Joy Kasson, David Leverenz, and Bruce Tucker, thank the committee members who worked together to make the conference a success: Jonathan Holloway, Isabelle Lehuu, Katherine Manthorne, Linda Maram, Carol Miller, James Miller, Jose Muñoz, Irene de Sousa Santos, Rinaldo Walcott, and Priscilla Walton.  ASA president Mary Kelley provided the vision for the program and also worked tirelessly with us in the trenches.  We are grateful to John Stephens and the ASA office staff, especially Cathy Eisenhower, convention coordinator, who supported us through the whole process of program preparation and made the conference itself flow smoothly.  Thanks also go to the Local Arrangements Committee: Isabelle Lehuu, Robert Martin, Nicola Nixon, and Gwendolen Owens, who did so much to help us enjoy the city of Montréal.

The call for papers announced our intention to make this conference as inclusive as possible, avoiding an intellectual or theoretical monoculture and reaching out both to traditional fields and approaches and to newer, previously under-represented areas.  The theme “Crossing Borders/Crossing Centuries” indicated our desire to “celebrate the tradition that has always distinguished American Studies scholarship: its willingness to cross disciplinary borders and to venture outside conventional definitions of scholarly practice.”  Such a broad call for papers produced, naturally, a rich collection of submissions, and this program committee also committed itself to working as a group of generalists selecting a varied program, not a set of specialists lobbying for particular fields.  On the whole, our attempt was a success.  We especially set out to attract sessions in areas that have been somewhat neglected recently, including visual arts and visual culture, international perspectives, religious studies, early American fields, and Native American studies.  We also sought to include performances of various kinds, and were delighted with the success of the five performers—Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Hellmut Gottschild, Jerry Longboat, Holly Hughes, and Carmelita Tropicana—and of the excellent reading by Thomas King.  Our own featured sessions included the American Studies Association President’s Forum and the Canadian Association for American Studies President’s Forum as well as a panel on adjunct faculty in the academy and a paper by a visiting Cuban scholar.  Range and breadth characterized the accepted submissions, with sessions on jazz, photography, drama, queer citizenship, abortion politics, mestizo history, the slave trade, Chicano/Latino film, Asian-American literature, racial biology, the Filipino diaspora, and writing for larger audiences.  As always, the individual paper submissions were wide-ranging, and the subcommittee on individual papers did a wonderful job of constructing new sessions from these disparate parts.

The hotel’s ability to provide over two hundred session slots meant that we were able to mount a large, diverse program, with approximately 1600 people in attendance. Despite some complications arising from doing business in Canada, the book exhibit was reasonably comprehensive. There were 48 booths rented, including four combined book exhibits, representing about 60 publishers. 

Each program committee encounters problems from which later groups can learn.  In our case, we discovered that our emphasis on performance brought up some thorny questions about compensation for performers.  We charged a nominal admission fee for some performances, while others were free.  Future committees may need to think about how to balance the need to pay for higher-priced performers with the need to keep the sessions open and accessible to all.  Furthermore, we encountered some unanticipated issues about payment for performers, including requests that were beyond the mandate of the Committee’s discretionary fund.  We chose against the extra fees that were requested by potential performers, reasoning that assistance to graduate students, for example, was a more compelling use for our limited funds.  But future program committees who want to include more performance sessions may have to consider other means of raising funds to do so.

The collaboration between the American Studies Association and the Canadian Association for American Studies also presented some unlooked-for issues. The mingling of scholars who do not normally encounter each other’s work provided opportunities for “real life” border crossings at the conference and the potential for new networks.  We learned, however, that managing a collaboration between organizations with different traditions and procedures and of vastly different size and membership raised more problems than we originally envisioned. The Co-Chairs recommend that any future collaborations between the two organizations should be preceded by a carefully worked-out agreement on procedures and expectations.

The meeting ran smoothly, with the usual small number of no-shows, and some stirrings of controversy at various sessions.  We received a few complaints from people whose sessions or papers had not been accepted.  But on the whole, attendees seemed to enjoy the meeting and to appreciate its breadth and scope.  The annual meeting is an important event for the field, especially as it continues to change and evolve.  We recommend that future committees continue to promote a diversity of voices at the conferences, including both older and younger members of the profession, geographical and international variety, as well as the dazzling range of scholarly fields that now align themselves with American Studies.

Program Committee Reflection

The Program Committee for the 1998 ASA Meeting gathered colleagues from a broad range of disciplines to present papers, performances, films, slides, roundtables, workshops, panels and sessions on many areas of American Studies scholarship including the theme of “American Studies and the Question of Empire: Histories, Cultures, and Practices.”

The theme of empire generated an excellent range of new and old scholarship, which discussed American national historical narratives as forms that produce particular understandings about the American past, its peoples, and its practices.  More specifically, in light of the centennial of U.S. expansion into the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and Hawai’i the conference featured outstanding work from a variety of perspectives on the global dimensions of America’s past as well as its present, and the links between regions and territories that have been forged through migration and immigration.  Many panels explored the connections between North America, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, considering how an international framework affects the concepts of U.S. nation, citizenship, domesticity, sexuality, culture, and canon.

Such an international framework, we found, not only expands the boundaries of the study of the United States, but it also compels us to rethink the subjects, objects, and methods of American Studies.  For example, a consideration of the 1948 Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo through which the U.S. incorporated large sections of what was previously Mexico, or a discussion of the U.S. involvement in the 1898 Spanish-American War in the Philippines, not only remaps the geopolitical boundaries of the United States, but such discussions also require us to rethink what “America” is as an object of study.  Such contextualization of the emergence of the United States within a long history of global encounters registers for us that a changed object of study demands different methods for knowing and different material archives for acquiring our knowledges.  This is not merely a matter of “adding on” the histories of Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, or the Philippines to that of “America,” but it undertakes instead the unearthing of the very materials that are buried in the building of an isolated concept of “America.”  In this sense many of the panels and sessions presented work in which “America” did not appear as a natural and given or as fixed, but rather “America” was presented as an object-in-process, making and remaking itself through the diverse histories of its encounter with regional, national, racial, and sexual “others.”  The most exciting of these panels succeeded in revising the ontology of the nation, unearthing new archives, demonstrating new scholarly practices and methods, and offering us nothing short of a new epistemology for American Studies.

In heralding the importance of this moment as an “opening” for American Studies, scholars often talk about the importance of including different stories in our understanding of America.  Indeed, the successes of this moment in the ASA are borne out in the association’s outstanding record of including different stories in the understanding of America – the stories of workers, African Americans, rural settlement and urban migration, men and women  — as Patricia Nelson Limerick declared in her 1996 presidential address: “To understand this complicated nation, we have to look at all the parts.”  The papers and panels in the 1998 meeting allow us to take the next step: they assist us in advancing our work on America’s multiracial and always already international history and on the urgency of its contemporary globally restructured history and culture.

Papers and panel for the 1998 conference featured a variety of work exemplifying the manifold dimensions of American Studies – the practical, empirical, historiographical, and epistemological contours of the field. A focused series of sessions on Native American Studies encouraged connections within and across panels, while emphasis on local issues in other panels offered association members an opportunity to learn more about the city and region in which we met. Special sessions about the American Quarterly, about the pedagogical and programatic concerns of American Studies Departments and Programs, about instructional technologies, about American Studies at Community Colleges, about alternative pedagogical sites, and about graduate student union organizing and career development provided practical and theoretical insight into the activities that command most of our time as teachers and students. One of the outstanding features of this year’s meeting was the integration and exchange of work across the Humanities and the Social Sciences, and the large numbers of panels that presented interdisciplinary conversations and work.  Scholars from Anthropology, Sociology, Geography, Communication, and Urban Planning exchanges ideas and perspectives on panels with colleagues from departments of Dance History, Theater, English, Music, and American Studies.

Many sessions made important connections between studies that might more easily remain disparate and discrete. Scholars connected the studies of African Americans with examinations of the U.S. war in Cuba.  Sessions put in relation the racial and sexual dimensions of Asian immigrant communities in the United States with the history of indentured servitude in the Caribbean. One panel compared and contrasted Emanuel Leutze’s paintings of Aztecs, Spaniards, Jews, Norsemen, and Anglo-Saxon women with Diego Rivera’s depictions of Native Americans.  Literary scholars from Brazil and Argentina presented comparisons between North and South American authors’ representations of race on a panel with U.S. literary scholars who emphasized how hemispheric issues appear in fiction by North American authors.  The theme of empire, expansion, and environment brought together panelists from English, Art, and Environmental Studies while a discussion of corporations and the business culture of diversity involved scholars from Sociology and Management in discussions with colleagues from English, Journalism, and Law, History, and Communication.  One discussion brought together Arnold Genthe’s photographic representations of Chinatown with Helen Hunt Jackson’s narrative representation of Indians in early California.

The 1998 annual meeting continued the extraordinary trajectory that the American Studies Association has experienced for more than a decade. The Association has become the most important professional organization for interdisciplinary scholars from an astounding range of perspectives and disciplines. At the same time, the egalitarian and democratic ethos that has always permeated American Studies remains as important as ever and is evidenced often through the careful collegiality and respect that informs our interactions. Our association has a history of innovation and daring, of creative efforts by concerned scholars attempting to address the trials of their time.  It should not be surprising that the ASA retains the loyalty of long time members for whom its existence offered a unique opportunity to do socially conscious, pedagogically rich, and epistemologically audacious work.  It should also not be surprising that such an organization would attract many of the most creative and innovative young scholars who see in it an opportunity to react creatively and constructively to the new realities that are emerging all around us.  Consequently, the 1998 annual meeting was not only an energetic and energizing place, but also a site for substantive scholarly discussions, a place for people to learn about and participate in emerging currents of research, analysis, and criticism.

There can be no final report on the 1998 meeting, because our work is too dynamic for that.  Four days of roundtables, panels, and presentations cannot possibly encompass the full intellectual life of a vibrant academic association; some of the best things that happen because of any national meeting happen long after it is over, once we start to digest the comments and criticisms we have received and offered to others.   Our national meeting was a site for meaningful argument and exchange, a place for the generation of meaningful questions that will help structure our activities as scholars and as citizens in the years ahead. Our emphasis on interdisciplinary, international, inter-racial, and inter-generational discussions originated in our desire to promote complex and creative work that broadens our conversations and leads us to likely and unlikely allies as we attempt to address the anxieties and opportunities of our time. 

Lisa Lowe and George Lipsitz

Program Committee Reflection

The program committee co-chairs, Sarah Deutsch, Gary Okihiro, and Patricia Turner, are grateful for the good labors of their committee members: Christine Bold, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Kevin Gaines, Herman Gray, Juanita Marie Holland, Lois Horton, Robert Martin, Kevin Meehan, Phyllis Palmer, and Bruce Tucker.  ASA president Mary Helen Washington worked closely with the committee and placed her distinctive mark on the final program.  We particularly enjoyed the opportunity to work with members of the Canadian Association for American Studies, and look forward to future collaborations.  The co-chairs must thank the ASA office staff, John Stephens, Reynolds Scott-Childress, John Staudt, and the many others who worked at the registration desk and behind the scenes at the meeting. They truly ran the conference, and they have our gratitude and thanks.

This year, we hosted a record number of sessions and participants. Virtually every session bore some relation to the conference’s theme, “Going Public,” coming at issues of public cultures and contested public terrains and representations from a mind-boggling array of perspectives, with our president, Mary Helen Washington, setting the standard in her multi-media presidential address.  Several sessions had overflow crowds, including “Musical Interrogations: The Blues Tradition. . .” and the conversation around Lawrence Levine’s OPENING OF THE AMERICAN MIND.  In truth, the conversation format proved highly successful; the participants stayed within their time limits, and a large number of the audience was able to participate.  The response to this and other sessions where panelists gave brief (five to ten-minute) presentations, leaving more time for audience discussion was extremely positive.  Although such formats might be overwhelming for the entire conference, many people encouraged us to arrange more of those kinds of sessions.

The usual problems regarding Sunday morning attendance arose, as well as, in this conference, problems of burn-out by late Saturday afternoon.  It’s not clear that there is any way around these problems as long as we want to continue our acceptance ratio.  Perhaps more panels mid-day on Saturday and fewer on Sunday morning would help, but that may not be possible depending on the conference facilities.  Some suggested different formats for late Saturday afternoon sessions to break and perk up the day’s rhythm.  Many believed holding sessions in two different hotels posed little difficulty, while others held that the division broke up the feeling of togetherness. (Some caught room-envy when comparing the differential accommodations.)  We received complaints over thin walls between adjoining sessions, especially when music was being played in the next room.  Those problems, of course, are recurrent and their resolution depend upon goodwill between neighbor panelists and a judicious selection of hotel site.

We appreciated the detailed instructions on how to reach the conference hotels from airports and train stations, but would urge future programs to include helpful information about public transportation in and about the cities we visit.  Washington, D.C., for example, has extensive public transportation systems that conferees might use to great advantage.

As we foresaw after having assembled the program, there were gaps that attendees rightly pointed out to us at the conference.  Those absences were in large part due to the limited range of  submissions with which the program committee had to work, despite our best efforts to recruit sessions in those underrepresented areas.  We would thus encourage proposals in the areas of law, the environment, labor, and the eighteenth century.

We also noted that many proposals failed to conform to the guidelines, and subsequent dealings between paper presenters and their chairs and discussants were sometimes marred by unprofessionalism.  We encourage all participants to adhere to basic understandings of courtesy, particularly as to getting papers to commentors on time, as a matter of professional courtesy, recognizing that discussants, too, are giving a public performance and need time to compose intelligent comments of use both to the audience and panelists.  We urge all participants to refer to the message by Peggy Pascoe and David Gutierrez, the 1996 program chairs, published in the ASA Newsletter 20:1 (March 1997).  Their advice is most helpful.

Our impressions, confirmed by most of the session chair evaluations, were that most panels were well-attended, the papers were of an overall high quality, and there were very few no-shows among the panelists.  The large number of excellent proposals and the record attendance at the conference affirm our belief that American Studies is uniquely situated to examine the public sphere(s) in all its (their) complexity, by virtue of the field’s very interdisciplinarity and its history of engagement between scholars and the public discourse.  Surely the richness and diversity of approaches to the questions of “Going Public” evidenced at this conference surpassed many of our understandings and expectations.  And that should be the measure of any conference.