CfP: What Happened? Continuities and Discontinuities in American Culture, NAAS Biennial Conference (Uppsala, Sweden)
What Happened? Continuities and Discontinuities in American Culture The 27th Biennial Conference of NAAS & the 11th Biennial Conference of SAAS Uppsala, Sweden, May 20-22, 2021 While it appears to be perennially tempting to see one’s own time as exceptional and unprecedented, it is nevertheless safe to say that our present time is perceived by many as characterized by crises of different kinds (democratic, humanitarian, environmental, medical, and economic crisis) to an unusually high degree. As a result, the stakes are high when it comes to identifying causes and cures and the political, media and academic communities are all concerned in their different ways with constructing narratives that make sense of what is happening: Backlash, renewal, apocalypse? Whatever their political, ideological or theoretical underpinnings or agendas, all mobilize tropes of either continuity – understood for instance as progress, degeneration or intensification – or discontinuity – understood for instance as a break […]