UCL Americas Research Network 2024 Conference – Historical Roots, Modern Realities: Nationalism Across the Americas

For the 2022 IAAS Postgraduate Symposium we invite delegates across all disciplines of American Studies to reflect on the twin themes of ‘rupture and repair.’ There have been many unprecedented and deeply divisive events in the Americas in recent years, as well as longer-standing issues of social atomisation, incarceration, gun crime and mass shootings, accelerated climate crisis, and growing social and financial inequality. Christina Sharpe has powerfully described how Black lives are lived ‘in the wake’ of slavery, and of the temporal breaks this creates: ‘In the wake, the past that is not past reappears, always, to rupture the present.’ Layli Long Soldier writes of how Native Americans and settler descendants ‘share a country but live in alternate nations.’ All of this leads to what Judith Butler has termed ‘precarious life,’ and a declining faith in the concept of progress. One of the definitions of ‘rupture’ is ‘the breach of […]