AAA conference 2010 call for papers

[Valentina]

         Dear
colleagues, 
 
I am organizing
a panel for the 2010 American Anthropological Association conference (New
Orleans, November 2010) 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 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. 

Papers that address gender/sexual
identities are also welcome. 
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.
-
Images of gender and sexual identities as they circulate among shores.
- 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.
- Papers with a language orientation and those looking at
performative genres are particularly welcome.
 
At
this point I am keeping the panel relatively open and I will eventually define
it more closely as it develops. The deadline for submission for invited panel
status is around the end of February. If you are interested let me know asap.

Best,

Valentina Pagliai
Department of Anthropology
CUNY Queens College