CfP: BrANCH PGR WIP Workshop

For the 2021 BAAS Postgraduate Symposium, we invite proposals from postgraduates and early career researchers across all disciplines and time periods that reflect aspects of the theme, Visibility/Invisibility: Representation & Community Formation in American Studies. The past two years have seen a renewed visibility of global activist movements, and we aim to both analyse how we as a community unearth narratives historically excluded from mainstream understanding, including how our work has been informed by recent sociopolitical, cultural, and economic movements working to amplify marginalised voices and perspectives. We seek to answer the following questions: what do we understand by the terms  ‘visibility/invisibility? How might gatekeeping and canonical understanding affect communities, representation, and our understanding of these terms? How does this impact the content of our research and our methodologies? How do we ensure the visibility of systematically minoritised voices? Is visibility/invisibility truly binary, and if so, how does this duality […]

The US Antimonopoly Tradition in Global Perspective The news media is currently awash with articles, op-eds, and think-pieces on monopoly, antitrust, and democracy’s fraught relationship with big corporations in general, and with Big Tech in particular. President Biden’s Executive Order Promoting Competition in the American Economy, issued on 9 July 2021, prompted a new wave of commentary on this topic. Writing in the New York Times, the distinguished labour historian Nelson Lichtenstein traced the lineage of Biden’s antitrust initiative all the way back to the Boston Tea Party and to abolitionists’ attacks on the slave power. “The nation’s antimonopoly tradition,” he wrote, “arises once more.” Much of this commentary, however, is resolutely national in its framing. It presents antimonopoly’s history almost as if it were hermetically sealed, and as such impervious to the global character of capitalism. Americans, of course, are not the only people around the world worried about […]

When the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional in its 1954/1955 Brown v. Board of Education decision, segregationists across the South formed a resistance movement, known by its self-designation as Massive Resistance. A masculinist rhetoric and the concomitant ideal of white womanhood has often led to the assumption that white women played a passive part in the defence of white supremacy. In contrast, white women were self-conscious agents who were motivated by an everyday culture of white supremacy and status concerns that accentuated whiteness as property and what W.E.B. Du Bois has termed 'the public and psychological wage of whiteness.' This talk will analyse the social backgrounds, strategies, and actions of two working-class white supremacist women's groups in Little Rock and New Orleans in the late 1950s and early 1960s and show how they strategically employed gendered rhetoric to transgress social […]

Fri 14 Jan | 12.00-13.00 | Online | Free Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/.../tZYqf... When was the last time you read an academic book cover to cover? Is there a book you would love to discuss outside a course reading list, or have been meaning to find the time read? In 2022 WASN is launching a new book club for members. Over a lunch hour we will meet online to catch up and talk about a book we loved, found provocative, or prevented us from sleeping at night. Or all of the above. For our first session we have chosen Keisha Blain’s, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America, (2021). Blain’s new biography of the civil rights activist offers a fascinating model for writing histories that connect and engage the needs of the present. So grab yourself a copy, or better still, put Until I am Free on […]

The organisers note that planning for the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Historians in the German Association of American Studies (DGfA) has been difficult because of the ongoing pandemic. To provide the best possible experience under the circumstances, they have decided to move the conference “Labor and Capital in U.S. History” to a “digital plus” format. This means that all panels will take place online, with an option for those wanting to come to Mainz to attend in-person if the pandemic situation improves. Accordingly, they are also reissuing the call for papers with these changed conditions in mind. The DGfA conference will take place February 11–12, 2022, virtually via Zoom and Gather and, hopefully, with an in-person option at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. They  are accepting applications for individual papers as well as panels, and they are opening the application for virtual poster presentations for doctoral students whose […]

Situating Black Feminist Thought in the Brazilian context brings insightful concepts about the importance of standpoints and knowledge production emerging from Latin America. ‘Our steps come from afar’ is a notion created by Jurema Werneck to explain how the Black Feminist epistemology is weaved through ancestral knowledge, Afro-Brazilian cosmovision and activism. Beyond resisting the racist colonial violence, the Brazilian Black feminism sheds light to counter narratives of coloniality, practices of refusing the place racism allocates to black people and daring to imagine-build a future other-wise.   Dr Katucha Bento Lecturer in Race and Decolonial Studies at University of Edinburgh