[URBANTH-L]CFP: Race, Gender and Nation in Imperial US

[Robert T. O'Brien]

Please see the CFP below and attached. 
 
I've limited this to the US because I think it's an important intervention
in both US urban anthro and in the lit on imperialism and nation. I could
see doing a double session, however, if I found enough non-US scholars to
work on these themes.
 
Best,
 
Rob
 
CFP: Race, Gender, and Nation in the Imperial US: Reconfigurations of Power
in the Local and Global
105th American Anthropological Association (AAA) Annual Meeting
November 15-19, 2006
San Jose Convention Center
San Jose, CA 
Submission Deadline: March 15, 2006
 
The dominance of the global economy by the "party of Davos" (as a Nation
writer recently characterized the transnational capitalist class) is shaping
new capitalist social relations that reconfigure race, gender, and nation.
Recognizing few national allegiances, transnational firms and the hyper-rich
have benefited from the progressive erosion of Western social welfare
states, privatization and corporate welfare, and military imperialism
ensuring access to labor, raw materials, and new markets. Capitalist and
military imperialism have overextended the US state's economic and military
reach abroad while curtailing rights and abrogating any remnants of the New
Deal social compact at home. Consequent with the US state's cuts in social
welfare services, the state has abetted finance and rentier capitalists by
deregulating banking and credit while allowing the most sweeping use of
eminent domain since the English enclosures. Showing no respect for national
boundaries that do not benefit them directly, the Davos class reaps profits
from death and displacement, exploitation and primitive accumulation.
Finally, race and gender - which have served as organizing principles in the
post-war expansion of a white, suburban, heterosexual American national
identity - are undergoing tremendous, often conflicting change as the class
trajectories of the vaunted American middle class are reversed. This session
will explore these transformations in an attempt to recognize the emerging
patterns of race, gender, and nation in the 21st Century.
 
Anthropologists, historians, and geographers have given us a wealth of data
on shifts in the global and state-level political economy, yet the careful,
textured ethnographic study proposed - of the consequences of these data on
what we might imagine the "'people' or 'party' of Porto Alegre" - does not
exist in sufficient quantity. Ethnography must provide a window on the
disruption of race, gender and nation in the local if we are to understand
local and global political economies. This session will begin an attempt to
address this, examining the play of global political economy in an urban US
that is undergoing "thirdworldization" (Chossudovsky) and a realignment of
axes of oppression and dominance. Session participants will explore the
local by tracing out changing configurations of race, gender, and nation
that, on the one hand, ideologically underwrite the depredations of
capitalists or serve as subject positions useful for maintaining hegemony
and, on the other, present useful imagined communities from which local
political action might emerge.
 
Individual papers should attempt to address:
*	Cross-race and/or cross-gender alliances along class lines or lines
of political struggle
*	Criminalizing and racializing the poor as a form of middle class
solidarity
*	Poor peoples' campaigns 
*	Cross-group organizing on prisons, healthcare, education, property
zoning
*	Differential use of "race" within US "racial" groups
*	Differential investments in "whiteness" among European Americans of
different class backgrounds and trajectories
*	Sexuality, race, and gender in housing markets
*	Differential imaginings of US nationalism along race, gender, and or
class lines;
*	Race, gender and nationalism among Gulf War and "War on Terror"
veterans and their families
*	Gender and nationalism in American religious life
 
Please send abstracts and queries by March 15, 2006 to robrien at temple.edu. 
Abstracts should be of no more than 250 words and follow AAA guidelines
http://www.aaanet.org/mtgs/2006/genrules.htm.
 
 
****************************************
"Neither we nor our most distant descendants will build the New Jerusalem or
the Garden of Eden; but we have, if we choose it, the pleasure of clearing
the ground, hoping that one day other hands will cultivate something more
like a garden -- a flawed and human garden, under sun, clouds, fog, and
rain, with our own ants and slugs and weevils, but alive with our own
raspberry  bushes, too, our weeping cherries and roses, our own vines, and
our own fig trees."
-- Michael Steinberg, _The Fiction of a Thinkable World_
 
Robert T. O'Brien 
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Anthropology 
Temple University 
 <mailto:robrien at temple.edu> robrien at temple.edu 
215-803-5181
 
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