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Home/Not Home: Centering American Studies Where We Are

November 17-20, 2016, Denver, Colorado

We are writing on behalf of the 2016 ASA Program Committee to say how much we hope you are planning to join us November 17-20 in Denver for an annual meeting that will feature compelling sessions on vital topics, including transphobic bathroom laws, Colorado’s ADX Florence supermax prison, the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre, and more.

The annual meeting is an expression of the collective knowledge and connective analyses of ASA members, and we are grateful to the hundreds of our colleagues from across the globe who submitted proposals this year. The meeting theme, “Home/Not Home: Centering American Studies Where We Are” generated thoughtful, incisive session proposals, including many on indigeneity and place, the politics of homelessness, prisons as not home, and the determinative power of race and migration on defining at-homeness, among many others. The program also features many sessions that do not match the theme but demonstrate the ongoing and emerging agendas of scholars who work in American studies.

The committee was not, of course, able to accept all submissions. The program includes 296 sessions that the committee accepted from the 328 session submissions. The percentage of accepted session submissions is consistent with what has happened in recent years. This year we received an unusually high number of proposals for individual papers (418). In spite of the high volume, the committee accepted a record percentage of proposals for individual papers. Those accepted proposals turned into 71 sessions.

The program committee also developed sessions that highlight the theme and emerging issues, including the proliferation of campus carry laws, the status of queer of color critique, whiteness and indigeneity, and blackness and the precarity of home. Several sessions will mark the enduring impact of figures who died since we last met, including Cedric Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Prince, Grace Lee Boggs, and Patrick Wolfe.

We remember these extraordinary figures in the midst of our annual routine, which somehow becomes more extraordinary every year. Whether ASA is your intellectual home, professional refuge, or your home/not home away from home/not home, we appreciate the opportunity to spend the past year working on your behalf as the association’s members and sustainers.

Robert Warrior
ASA President

Sharon P. Holland
J. KÄ“haulani Kauanui
Jean M. O’Brien
Co-Chairs, 2016 ASA Program Committee

 

"Nah-kev-ho-eyea-zim." This Cheyenne language phrase appears on a wall half of a mile from the hotel and convention center in Denver, Colorado where the American Studies Association will hold its annual meeting in November, 2016. That wall stands behind "Wheel," a 50-foot diameter 2005 sculpture the Denver Art Museum commissioned Cheyenne/Arapaho artist HOCH E AYE VI Edgar Heap of Birds to make. Heap of Birds translates the Cheyenne phrase in English as "We are always returning home again."

 

This short statement about home--its declarative confidence and the many responses it can evoke in the context of American studies, helps clarify the theme for the Denver meeting: Home/Not Home: Centering American Studies Where We Are.

 

Home is an operative, even constitutive category in the Indigenous world and in Native studies, but Home/Not Home is meant to be more than a way to highlight distinctions of perspective insofar as it hopefully provokes scholarly engagements that invigorate and challenge the habits of home and not home imbricated across the many commitments and locations in and of our work.

 

The problem of home for American studies is what home has become. We will share downtown Denver with thousands whose home is the streets. Plenty of attendees who will enjoy the shelter of our convention hotel equate home with violence, absence, rejection, and psychic violation. So, why would we be always returning home again? Romanticism, nostalgia, false consciousness?

 

Perhaps, but why make a sculpture of a medicine wheel on the site of Cheyenne and Arapaho removal so distant from the contemporary homes of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Osages, Utes, and other Indigenous peoples whose homelands make up the palimpsest upon which the gleaming city of Denver has inscribed itself, framed by what is now the state of Colorado? A basic premise of this call is that the sculpture's public utterance about returning home is an aesthetic intervention linking Indigenous memory, the homeless denizens of Denver's streets, and the material conditions that make home possible and impossible in the Americas and, thus, in the places where we are when we do American studies.

 

The "we" Heap of Birds invokes, in other words, is distinct from but also deeply resonant with Toni Morrison's searing supplication, "Tell us...what it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company." Morrison's us and Heap of Birds's we are all the more generative and inclusive if we consider how their words speak to non-human persons such as the great bison herds whose slaughter makes them absent from their home places. And what happens if those places -- the plains and the Rocky Mountains that meet where we will be meeting -- gain the status of personhood in our scholarly deliberations?

 

The theme for ASA Denver 2016 is an invitation to grapple with home/not home as an inexorable material reality of where we do American studies. Denver provides plenty of opportunities to engage local and regional histories as varied as the massacre at Sand Creek to the capitalist excesses and pretensions of Aspen and Boulder. 2016 will also be compelling in terms of timing. The first post-Obama US national election will have been decided just a few weeks before the meeting. Betty Grable, Walter Cronkite, Yehudi Menuhin, Movita Castaneda, and Albert Einstein's theory of relativity share a centenary in 2016. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the Jeep will both have 75th anniversaries. Desert Storm will have its 25th.

 

Denver and Colorado also figure in significant ways in North American cultural history, with Denver serving as the point from which Jack Kerouac turns On the Road south to Mexico and the Woody Creek home base (and scenes not just of Freak Party campaigns but also domestic abuse and violence) of the later Hunter S. Thompson. The music of John Denver, Judy Collins, Earth, Wind, and Fire, India.Arie, Glenn Miller, and the Lumineers comes out of Colorado. So does Warren Zevon's catchy 1991 tune "Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead" and the 1995 neo-noir Gary Fleder cult film of the same name. Both the Denver airport and Denver March Powwow could easily be the subject of multiple sessions. The Rocky Mountains have their own history even as climate change is altering rivers and forests in unpredictable ways. If all that isn't enough, ASA Denver 2016 will be the first annual meeting of the association in a state where marijuana use is legal. To conclude, a major feature of the 2016 theme is to privilege Indigenous claims to the places where we meet, claims that should indubitably command the attention of the future of American studies. Home/Not Home, however, asks for more than a recognition of Indigenous claims amid a great collection of papers and panels. The 2016 theme is a claim on the way where we are shapes and shakes up the grounding and grounded-ness of the work we imagine, make, perceive, and do.

 

The deadline for proposals of panels and individual papers is February 1, 2016.

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