Panels seeking Participants

Chinese Exceptionalism in the 21st Century: Replicating the American Example

During the 20th Century, the notion of “American Exceptionalism” emerged, most notably perhaps from 1968 with publication of Redeemer Nation by Ernest Lee Tuveson. It is not a myth, but a reality, that the United States became a “Redeemer Nation” at least from World War Two until much later in the 20th Century. Whether what was once a reality now has become a myth is debatable.

Much more evident is the reality that the People’s Republic of China has become what could be termed a “Redeemer Nation” as well, following deliberately in the pathway America carved. The 20th Century was referred to frequently as “The American Century,” partly due to American Exceptionalism, and quite possibly the 21st Century will become known eventually as “The Chinese Century,” due to Chinese Exceptionalism.

This Panel will consider examples of Chinese Exceptionalism, to begin with, and then examine the origin and characteristics of each example. The purpose of doing so will be to test the hypothesis that, far from challenging American Exceptionalism (except sometimes in rhetoric), China has silently embraced it, and gradually copied it in significant ways. Part of the evidence seems to be China’s rise from isolation to becoming a global leader in ways that have paralleled the American experience, but in a more recent era, ranging from China’s own “Manifest Destiny” in the liberation and economic subsidisation of XiZang, to its global peacekeeping expenditures and commitments, to its foreign direct investment (FDI) globally and even in America itself.

Presenters wishing to join this Panel may contact Dr. David A. Jones, Professor of Law, Management, Foreign Policy, American Studies Center, University of Warsaw, Poland. david.jones@uw.edu.pl

Discourses of War and Peace from a Transnational American Studies Perspective

War, and even more so peace, have been by and large conspicuous by their absence in the current debate over the internationalization of American Studies. It is not so much that scholars omit references to wars as such, but the fact that war and peace are not thought of as conceptual paradigms through which to articulate the discourse of transnational American Studies.

And yet both peace and war are by definition trans-national; they negotiate between and across borders, identities, histories, and cultures. This panel wishes to investigate in what ways both War and Peace Studies may intersect with and contribute to the current reconfiguration of the field of American Studies. Topics to be investigated include, but are not limited to, war and peace as border-crossing experiences; responses to U.S. occupation/liberation of foreign countries, from the nineteenth-century to the present; American responses to their own acts of conquest/liberation; comparative analyses of American war literatures; peace movements as transnational formations.

Presenters wishing to join this Panel may contact Giorgio Mariani giorgio.mariani@uniroma1.it

THE GREENING OF THE AMERICAN MIND: RACE, CLASS, GENDER AND THE ENVIRONMENT IN POST-SEPTEMBER 11 US

Abstract:
Perhaps no other writer has expressed the role played by nature in the configuration of the American psyque more powerfully than Willa Cather in the opening lines of her novel O, Pioneers!, when her narrator describes the first, often unsucessful, attempts to survive in the endless and flattened prairies of the Nebraskan Plains. However, in American culture two opposing attitudes towards nature and the environment can be traced back to the founding era: a conservationist trend coexisting, and often conflicting, with a Puritan fear of unmediated nature. This peculiar relation of humans with the environment has been the subject of many classic works in American Studies that explore the essential role that nature has played in the configuration of the national character and point it out as fundamental component of American exceptionalism. An exceptionalism that ended abruptly in September 11, 2001. If the destruction of the World Trade Center inaugurated the 21st century with the evidence that the US was under attack, Hurricane Katrina, four years later, became a devastating ally to the forces that were trying to destroy the American way of life. Floods, snowstorms, fires, and droughts seem to be striking the United States as never before. Climate change cannot be dismissed as a mere hypothesis anymore. Literature, a permanent mirror of the natural world, has always portrayed the problematic relationship that human beings have with the environment. Now that the climate change is relocating the protagonism of the individual in favour of the primacy of the land, it becomes necessary to redefine the place of the human being in relation to nature. The title of our proposal, “The Greening of the American Mind“ intends thus to explore the intersection of concepts such as race, gender and class with the environment. We are then interested in the various ways in which ecology is propiciating the emergence of a new critical categorization that erases the traditional distinctions based on ethnic or sexual principles, specially after September 11 and Hurricane Katrina. Hence, we invite contributions addressing the exploration of this new categorization as reflected in theory, contemporary literature and related arts. We propose the following sub-themes: -Past and present: evolving approaches to nature in American literature.
-Problems in ecocritical theory.
-American nature writing and environmental politics.
-Ethnic literatures, environmental justice, and ecocriticism.
-Ecocriticism and urban environments.
-Ecofeminism in American contemporary literature.
-Imagining the Earth: ecocriticism in the 21st century.
-Kyoto accord and American exceptionalism.
-Katrina and American exceptionalism.
-Literary ecology in American contemporary literature.
-Ecocriticism & postcolonial theory.
-America North-South relations from a ‘green perspective’.
-Globalisation and contemporary politics.
-Ecocritical tropes: wilderness, pastoral and apocalypse.

PLEASE SEND SHORT PROPOSALS TO THE Organizers:

Dr. Manuel Broncano Rodríguez: Universidad de León (Spain) manuel.broncano@unileon.es
Dr. Rosa María Díez Cobo: Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata (Argentina) circe83@hotmail.com