Depictions of the American West in popular culture (literature, film, new media) have tended, both subtly and overtly, to bolster extractive capitalism and the subjugation of women and indigenous populations. Therefore it is crucial to understand how popular cultural texts historically have ...
Studies of sound are often overly determined by an emphasis on the physical, stable agents of a process, despite, or because of, sound's assumed ephemerality. The sounding body, sonic technologies, and the sonorous object all enjoy pride of place in studies of sound's mediation of the social and...
This session takes as its premise an all too common event among graduate students and professional ethnographers: whatever prospectus one wrote about methods becomes trash on arrival at a research location. The presenters have experienced this event with mixed feelings, those liberation (the...
Famously, in his Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire declares the great crime of Hitler to be the unsanctioned substitution of the object of anti-black violence: “the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of...
People never stop resisting unfair treatment imposed on them. Sometimes, they struggle single-handedly, while in many cases, their campaigns may be capitalized by a few demagogues with much broader and more ambitious goals that they do not necessarily endorse. In order to magnify their voice,...
This 2019 annual meeting theme, “build as we fight,” reminds us that revolutions necessarily entail a double investment, both in negating domination and exploitation and affirming alternative forms of life. The theme also leaves open the possibility that the relationship between what must be...
Arab American Studies is a significant site for analyzing and envisioning transnational and ecological connectivity, particularly given recent interdisciplinary scholarship that emphasizes intersections with fields such as trans-Indigenous, Palestine, queer, and Black studies. For example, Arab...
We seek interdisciplinary papers for a proposed panel at the 2019 American Studies Association conference investigating the overlapping geographies of race and risk. While scholars have primarily emphasized risk as a modality of liberal governance and a technology of rule, our approach considers...
Islamophobia is a kind of xenophobia which stigmatizes Middle Eastern-Americans as “others’ against “us”. The important point about Islamophobia is that it is a social phobia and anxiety, not an individualistic one, which can be considered as a reaction toward Islamic identity. Although the...
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, prisons and reformatories across North America began to offer the resources necessary for imprisoned people to publish their own newspapers. What resulted was the Penal Press, a large circuit of print matter written, edited, illustrated, and often...
