AAA 2010 preliminary call for papers

[Val Pagliai]

I am organizing
a panel for the 2010 
        
Dear
colleagues,
 
I am organizing
a panel for the 2010 AAA on the performance and imagination of the
Mediterranean from either the immigrant side or the "native" side and
the connected construction of racial/ethnic identities. I
welcome submissions for papers. 
 
In the
past there has been much scholarship dedicated to the "Mediterranean"
that tended to reify it as a cultural area. This panel, taking a linguistic
anthropological perspective, would point at the performed nature of such
entity. “Performance” can be understood as language use, but also in the sense
of performing it through the act itself of crossing the boundaries, state
boundaries and imaginary boundaries, and crossing the body of water itself. 
 
The papers should address race and/or identity in
an innovative and complex/nuanced way, rethinking the connection between racial
categories and senses of belonging.
The topics could
include (but not be limited) to the following:
 
- How
locals and immigrants see themselves and the respective relations, including
relations between their countries of origins.
- How these
images are “circulated” and/or mirror each other. 
- Performative
genres’ diasporas across the Mediterranean, including Hip-Hop. 
- Hybrid
musical and performative traditions. How the genres are rethought as part of
the imagination of Mediterranean identities.
- The
movements and emergence of educational models and ideas. For example, papers on
different approaches to bilingualism and multilingualism in schools across the
Mediterranean, etc. and the way they perform or create/imagine race and
identity.
- Use of ideas
of race and racial belonging in the media that index Mediterranean senses of
belonging, or highlight boundaries vis-à-vis the non-Mediterranean. 
- Imaginations of national origins and common histories.
- Globalization
and transnational fluxes that focus around the Mediterranean.
-
Images of relative wealth and poverty and economic and political relationships
(and how they are imagined).
- It
is important for me to include papers that focus on the southern and eastern
shores of the Mediterranean, not only on its “European” ones.
 
At
this point I am keeping the panel relatively open and I will eventually define
it more closely as it develops. If you have an idea for a contribution, let me
know.
 
Best, 


Valentina Pagliai
Department of Anthropology
CUNY Queens College

Contact:
Powdermaker 314G
Queens College
65-30 Kissena Blvd
Flushing, NY 11367
 
Phone# (908) 668-4840  (h)
            


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