International conference “Frontiers and Wastelands”
The Boundaries of US American Identity
Where: Instituto Franklin-UAH, Alcalá de Henares, Spain
When: November 25th – November 26th, 2024
Description: Reprising its first edition, the conference will focus on how US American identities have been shaped, informed, configured, and challenged since the country’s foundation. It will look at the centrality of boundaries broadly intended and borderlands as geopolitical, sociocultural, metaphorical zones of liminality. Boundaries that have been deployed to construct (and deconstruct) the dominant national identity and its narratives. Just as it happens along geopolitical borders, the proximity of otherness—which dwells in the borderlands themselves—implies a more or less overt threat to the sovereignty and cultural integrity of the nation eliciting a variety of perceived dangers. Stereotypes are born and binaries are created to maintain such integrity, playing on the difference and opposition between inclusion / exclusion, civilization / savagery, correctness / incorrectness, insider / outsider, us / them.
The conference invites reflections on the multimodal representations of the boundaries of US identity in popular culture and discourses, focusing on the diversity of identities, liminality, and disenfranchised experiences of US Americanness, as well as the construction of borders—both material and metaphorical—as means to define the US national imaginary.
Institution: PopMec, Instituto Franklin-UAH, Universidad de Valladolid, AMICUSS (American Interdisciplinary Cultural StudieS)
For more information about the International conference “Frontiers and Wastelands: The Boundaries of US American Identity”, click here.
