| This conference will examine
the cultural response to war in America, with particular
emphasis on how literary, visual and dramatic representations
of armed conflict from the seventeenth century to the present
become occasions to reimagine America’s place in the
world. As such, the conference aims to focus energies devoted
to “internationalizing” American Studies, by inviting
renewed attention to specific moments of ethnic violence
and military intervention, to global partnerships, diplomacy,
strategic alliances and transcultural contact. By drawing
together scholars who have turned their attentions to various
scenes of conflict — from colonial encounters to the
Civil War to U.S. campaigns abroad — the event will
consider the rhetoric and iconography of war as a recurrent
feature of attempts to articulate America’s national
project while commemorating its losses and gains. At the
same time, this conference will examine the special importance
of war to the interpretive gestures of American Studies,
a discipline crucially shaped in the decades spanning WWII
and the Vietnam War, and long invested in arguments about
violence in the name of national interests. Our hope is
that close attention to narratives of American combat will
encourage discussion of how war stories have helped to define
and challenge the history of American Studies itself. The
event will facilitate such discussions by structuring multi-disciplinary
panels that are devoted both to analyzing discrete historical
conflicts, and to the interpretation of war discourse across
time and into our present moment. This event is being co-sponsored
by UCSB's Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, The English
Department and the American Cultures Center. |
