Review: ANZASA 2021 (Online)
As the Australia and New Zealand American Studies Association met for its biannual conference on November 24-25th, the conference’s key themes of ‘American Crisis’ and ‘American Renewal’ were kept in an incredibly fine balance. Hosted by the Macquarie School of Social Sciences, ANZASA 2021 was the Association’s first pandemic-era conference and was predictably haunted by the spectre of Trumpism. The overall emphasis was understanding America’s history as one of perpetual crisis, registered not only in political instability or economic decline, but also, perhaps most corrosively, in interpretive struggles over the nation’s future trajectory. Professor Michael Thompson (Australian Catholic University) opened the programme with his keynote, ‘Environmental Crisis and Renewal in the Global New Deal Era: A Biography of the “Eleventh Commandment”’. This ambitiously wide-ranging lecture explored the Global New Deal through a combination of environmental, religious, and transnational history. Professor Thompson prefaced his lecture by stating ‘it sounds ambitious, and […]
Continue ReadingPanel Review: ‘Elemental America’ BAAS Annual Conference 2021 (Online)
The British Association for American Studies (BAAS) held their 2021 conference entirely in a digital mode. This made the conference more sustainable and accessible – yet during a global pandemic, it is also a necessity. I’m currently based in Lisbon, so it was the only way I could ‘attend’ it! This being said, the conference was a breath of fresh air. This was especially true for the roundtable I attended via Zoom: ‘Elemental America’ took place on April 6th at 14:00-15:30 BST. It was organized and chaired by Dr. Moritz Ingwersen from the University of Konstanz. The theme of the roundtable was inspired by the concept of Elemental Ecocriticism from the 2015 book by the same name, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert. Elemental ecocriticism is how the elements feature in ecocriticism, which is the portrayal of the natural world in literature. However, this roundtable was also a […]
Continue ReadingReview: ‘Indigenous Mobilities: Travellers through the Heart(s) of Empire,’ Beyond the Spectacle (Online)
Organized by the collaborative AHRC research project “Beyond the Spectacle” (University of Kent, University of East Anglia and University of British Columbia), “Indigenous Mobilities: Travellers through the Heart(s) of Empire” engaged speakers in a 4-day discussion around the importance of Indigenous travels and movement in scholarly and non-scholarly debates. In particular, the conference advocated for the need to rewrite colonial narratives from an Indigenous point of view, and in so doing implement practices which can underscore the shaping impact of transnational Indigenous agents on the development of Empire(s). The conference (streamed online due to Covid restrictions) included more than 38 presentations in 15 panels. These papers touched on a wide range of topics, all also related to questions of Indigenous belonging, representation, and sovereignty. Despite the high quality of all the participants’ contributions, this review can only present a small thematical selection of all the papers discussed. One of the […]
Continue ReadingPanel Review: ‘Pop Cultural Interventions’ BAAS Annual Conference 2021 (Online)
One of the final sessions for the British Association for American Studies 2021 digital conference was titled Pop Cultural Interventions, chaired by Dr. James Peacock (Keele University). Pop culture covers a wide range of subjects and media which was reflected in this conference session, including discussion of film, television, social media and video gaming. Thematically, the first two presentations looked at how audience reaction to mainstream media and news events becomes creation and production of culture. The second two presentations discussed cultural projections and imaginations on to nature, and how this is used to reinforce cultural belief and ideology. Overall, the intertwining of culture as something produced, consumed and reproduced again, rather than something static, held all the presentations together. The speakers questioned what narratives are being told, what biases they might contain and looked at the historical significance of such narratives. Beginning the presentations, Dr. Lyndsay Miller (University of […]
Continue ReadingPlenary Speaker Interview: Laura Marks interviewed by Michael Hedges, BAAS 2021 Annual Conference
Laura U. Marks is the Principal Investigator of Tackling the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media, a research group at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. This interdisciplinary project brings together researchers from the university’s School for the Contemporary arts (Laura U. Marks and Radek Przedpełski) and the School of Engineering Science (Stephen Makonin and Alejandro Rodriguez-Silva). The project is funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Its aim is clear: to address the high and rising electricity consumption of information communication technologies. As the group sets out on its website, ‘[s]treaming media is calculated to contribute to a surprising 1% of global greenhouse gases, because most regions of the world obtain electricity from fossil fuels to power their data centers, networks, and devices. Streaming large files in large quantities, then, ethically implicates spectators in the warming of the planet.’ I sat down with Laura (over Zoom) to discuss the necessary […]
Continue ReadingPanel Review: ‘Lights, Camera, Crash: Finance and Contemporary Genre Film’, BAAS Annual Conference 2021 (Online)
The conference for the 2021 British Association for American Studies was held entirely online this year in response to the global pandemic of Covid-19 and as a way to hold an almost carbon neutral conference in response to growing concerns around climate change. Indeed, the first session of the conference titled Lights, Camera, Crash: Finance and Contemporary Genre Film chaired by Dr. Cara Rodway (Deputy Head of the Eccles Centre at The British Library), thematically revolved around another global catastrophe: the financial crisis of 2008, when American stock market crashes created a wave of financial uncertainty for many across America and the world. The financial crash began with the accumulation of risky housing mortgages by investment insurance institutions, pension funds and insurance companies. Housing values plummeted dramatically as homeowners defaulted on their mortgages and investment banks were stuck with worthless investments and mounting debt. The entire financial stream froze, causing […]
Continue ReadingReview: “20/20 Vision: Citizenship, Space, Renewal,” EAAS Annual Conference 2021 (Online)
Organised by the European Association for American Studies, “20/20 Vision: Citizenship, Space, Renewal” coincided with the 400th anniversary of the establishment of the Plymouth Foundation and invited scholars to contemplate on American history, politics and culture. The conference called for an exploration of three broad thematic areas: the aspect of citizenship, issues of the environment and the idea of renewal. The overarching concept of “20/20 vision”, an optical term denoting normal visual clarity and sharpness of sight, sought to underscore pressing questions on historical distance, visibility and invisibility of various American socio-historical, cultural and literary aspects. In this way, the event allowed Americanists – mostly from European and American academia – to re-frame and re-evaluate the plurality of narratives and counter-narratives throughout the history of the American nation. The quadricentennial became a reference point not only for sheer celebration but also critical thinking. In the keynote lecture “1620 / 2020: […]
Continue ReadingPanel Review: ‘Lineages of Black Activism’, BAAS Annual Conference 2021 (Online)
Organized by the Digital British Association for American Studies, the 66th American Studies conference invited scholars to critically engage with American literature, history, culture and politics in North America, the United States and the Americas more broadly. All sessions took place remotely through a digital events platform, Zoom. In the context of the sixtieth anniversary of the Freedom Rides, an iconic and much-celebrated landmark of civil rights protests Dr. Hannah Jeffery, Dr. Astrid Haas and Dr. John Kirk explored counter-narratives to the official records of Black activism. More specifically, Dr. Jeffery (University of Edinburgh) used a series of murals as a narrative thread through her discussion of Black activism. She analyzed the significance of different murals which first appeared during the 1960s and subsequently turned into subversive cultural forms. More specifically, she focused on The Wall of Truth (1969) and the muralist Eugene Eda Wade that turned into sites of communal […]
Continue ReadingPlenary Review: Dr Laura Marks, BAAS Annual Conference 2021 (Online)
‘Conference Review: ‘British Association for American Studies 2021’, Plenary Address: ‘Streaming Media, Online Conferences, and the Jevons Paradox’, 5th April 2021. Dr Laura U. Marks’ opening plenary at the 66th British Association for American Studies (BAAS) came after a year during which many of us have organised, attended, or presented at an online conference. Some will have tallied up an impressive combination of all three. We have grown accustomed to addressing an audience of dozens through the webcams on our computers, taking it on trust that the delegates are there at all. Posing questions to eminent researchers from our kitchen tables in semi-formal attire – from the waist up, at least – is now second nature. The benefits of moving conferences online in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic soon racked up. It has hugely improved accessibility, particularly for the d/Deaf community. Online conferencing has brought increased opportunities for […]
Continue ReadingPanel Review: ‘Recent Work in Asian American Studies’
Chaired by Eithne Quinn, the roundtable ‘Recent Work in Asian American Studies’ was a critical component of the larger British Association for American Studies (BAAS) conference. Deeper discussion of marginalised texts and authors is always pertinent, and this certainly includes the entire “body” of Asian American literature with its many intricate blends of genres and movements, which only became an official field of study in 1982. Considering the horrific murders of six Asian American women in Georgia in March 2021, as well as the increasing violence and abuse recently enacted on Asian Americans as blame for Covid-19, it was particularly appropriate to counter such prejudice with a session that both celebrated developments of Asian American writers, as well as zealously urged further scholarship in an under-studied area. The presentations also warned that even throughout our growing awareness of the evils of racial privilege and bias, it is extremely easy to […]
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