Description: In May of 1971, Marvin Gaye released What’s Going On, a concept album that documented various social injustices that made America far from great. Songs on the record explored American involvement in Vietnam, environmental degradation, racist police, urban poverty and other issues confronting the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Gaye also addressed divisions within the nation, divisions that have persisted since then and have come to be framed as the “culture wars.” In the LP’s title track, he invites others to speak with him so that they can inform each other of what they believe is going on.
This online conference takes its title from Gaye’s masterpiece, a choice precipitated in part by the election of Donald Trump in November 2024, for many of us are thinking about how to make sense of that event. The question “what’s going on?” asks for a description of the salient and defining features of a given historical moment, particularly the present, but it also gestures towards continuities from/within the past, namely divisions and struggles that have been “going on” for some time. Although Trump’s election might seem like, and might even be, an aberration or a crisis, it also represents long-standing tendencies within the nation.
Submission guidelines: We invite papers that address “what’s going on” in the United States. Papers can be from different disciplinary approaches and can focus on various aspects of American society and culture from all periods. Some themes might include (but are not limited) to the following:
- Divisions within the nation, past, present, or future
- Nativism and immigration (of people, ideas, culture)
- Christian, white, and other nationalisms
- Cultural canons as contributing or resisting the status quo
- American authoritarianism and fascism
- Black and/or Indigenous futurisms
- The backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion
- American utopias and/or dystopias
- Climate change and environmental crises in film, fiction, television
- Exceptionalism vs. internationalism
- Critiques of the present
- Conspiracy theories and other narratives
- The apparent triumph of wealth/gilded ages
- Everyday extremism
- Free speech/the New McCarthyism
Please email 250-word proposals and brief bios to CA****************@mt*.ca
Submission deadlines: March 31st, 2025
Institution: The Canadian Association for American Studies
For more information, click here.
