AAA call for panel

[Val Pagliai]

This
is the last call for papers for 
        
Dear
colleagues,
 
This
is the last call for papers for the panel “Performing the Mediterranean,” for
the 2010 American Anthropological Association conference (New Orleans, November
2010). The panel will focus on immigration, the performance and imagination of
the Mediterranean from either the immigrant side or the "native"
side, and the construction of racial/ethnic/gender identities. 
 
In the
past there has been much scholarship dedicated to the Mediterranean that tended
to reify it as a cultural area, imagined as bounded in ancient laws of honor
and shame. This panel intends to point at the performed nature of such entity,
where “performance” is understood not only 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, or
circulating signs and genres. These perpetual crossings and diasporas create
hybrid places, genres, and identities. Songs, music and traditional
performative genres navigate between shores, at each movement subjected to
reinvention, including of their history, and new claims of authenticity. 
 
Yet the Mediterranean is not a purely idyllic place of free
exchange. Circulation of discourses and signs are not free from power
relationships. The papers in this panel intend to interrogate the articulation
of power in this construction, and the ways in which the shores stand across
each other in an unequal relationship. Crossed by migratory fluxes the
Mediterranean is a racialized and gendered discursive place, where senses of
belonging are actively played through imagination of the “races” that would
encounter each other on its shores. In front of the arrival of increasing
number of immigrants the northern shores are clamping down, refusing the
circulatory movement in the water ring to embrace the Mediterranean as dividing
line, as barrier that separates, to see reflected in it ancient barriers of
biology and blood. 
 
Performing the Mediterranean means at the same time constructing
senses of belonging, including racial and ethnic belonging, racial categories,
and with them racial hierarchies. These can be fluid and hybrid, yet this
fluidity cannot hide the racist ideologies that come to play a role, especially
those that, in southern Europe, are connected to the articulation of European
identities. Across this
racial boundary are projected racialized images of each other. Between
“fortress Europe” with its imposed identity and its exclusions, and the
“developing” world, the Mediterranean sits as a place of contradictions, a
rather chaotic space where differences clash and mend at the same time. 
 
Current
contributors: Maria Luisa Achino-Loeb (NYU), Beatrice Fracchiolla (Université
de Paris 8), Deborah Kapchan (NYU), Saul Mercado (Vassar), Valentina Pagliai
(CUNY), Inma Sanchez (Temple U) and Chantal Tetreault (Michigan State U).
 
This
will be a double panel and there are a few open slots left. If you are
interested in joining let me know ASAP as our deadline is coming soon, February
28.
 
Best,
 
Valentina Pagliai
Department of Anthropology
CUNY Queens College & Lehman College
http://www.aiserarchive.com/ValentinaPagliai/

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


There Is No Place Like Everywhere