[URBANTH-L]CFP: Travel Trade and Ethnic Transformations (Hungary)

[Lisa Maya Knauer]

7th Biennial MESEA Conference
The Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas

16–20 June 2010
University of Pécs, Hungary

Call for Papers Travel, Trade and Ethnic Transformations

Travel, movement and mobility are essential in human life: they shape 
individualities, histories and the stories people tell. In particular, 
labor, commerce, exile, tourism, transnational and transcontinental 
migrations have led to the socio-political and cultural production of 
dominant images of subjectivities and nationhoods. People’s 
identification with “imagined communities” and their experience with 
“encountered ones” has determined ethnicity’s and diaspora’s infinitely 
variable socio-political and cultural content. However, neither 
panethnicity nor transmigrant/postcolonial hybridity can resolve the 
crisis of a liberal commodified polity. Ideologies of difference and 
subjectivity need to be critically regrounded in the realities of global 
capitalism, political economy and the changing structures of 
institutional and disciplinary power. This conference, then, aims to 
focus on the ways that travel and trade contribute to the definition and 
redefinition of ethnic subjectivities in the realms of culture, 
politics, history, and sociology, economics and law, language, 
literature and the arts in Europe and the Americas. The following list 
of topics is meant to be suggestive rather than restrictive:

• Imperial Routes: Mapping a pan-European political sensibility as 
opposed to a racialist logic of civilization, sovereignty and 
self-government
• Travel, location, and race/ethnicity
• Kaleidoscopic ethnicity: Trade, migration and the formation of 
community identities
• Ethnicity and the politics of world trade
• Colonization and ethnicity
• Diasporic cultural forms and transcultural networks
• Diasporic and nativist identity formation – tension or co-existence?
• Cultural and social “rise” as conducive to cultural/social invisibility
• Cosmopolitan diasporas
• Cosmopolitanism in creative tension with the nation-state and 
assimilationist ideologies
• Deterritorialization vs. reterritorialization: De/racination in 
diaspora and the politics of origin
• Postethnicity – global travel and ethnic (re)contextualizations
• Diaspora and trans-ethnic solidarities, such as against racism, class, 
gender, social movements
• Feminist politics of location
• Gendering diasporas within diaspora communities and across 
trans-ethnic networks
• Language, religion, and the formation of local communities
• Immigration, intermarriage, and community solidarity
• The politics and poetics of population integration
• Discourses of displacement – routes vs roots
• Exile and postmodern migrants
• Travel, tourism and cultural politics
• Travel writing and ethnography
• Sites / Sights: Exhibitionism and commodification

Proposals can be submitted to our website between August 15 and November 
15, 2009. Submitters will receive notification of acceptance or 
rejections by December 15, 2009.

Inter/transnational and inter/transdisciplinary proposals as well as 
complete panels will be given preference.

Note that MESEA will award two Young Scholars Excellence Awards. For 
more information please see: http://www.mesea.org