CAAS > Conference

States of Emergency: Crisis, Panic and the Nation

An Interdisciplinary Conference Sponsored by the Canadian Association of American Studies and The Centre for American Studies, University of Western Ontario.

November 13-16 2009.

Call for Papers

In the Federalist 28, Alexander Hamilton observed ‚“that emergencies will sometimes exist in all societies, however constituted; that seditions and insurrections are, unhappily, as inseparable from the body politic as tumors and eruptions from the natural body.” Americans have become used to the language of emergency, even tolerant of otherwise troubling political and governmental actions undertaken in response to declared crisis. But even a cursory march through American history and culture confirms Madison’s view of the state’s inseparability from “eruption”: the Antinomian Crisis, the Charter Crisis, the Salem witch trials, the Revolutionary Crisis, the Constitutional Crisis, the Nullification Crisis, the Sectional Crisis, the Slavery Crisis, and any number of financial crises and panics construe a largely unbroken narrative of emergency and response that continues through the 20th Century (the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, multiple Red Scares, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Oil Crisis, the Iran-Hostage Crisis), and into the 21st (9-11, the War on Terror, Hurricane Katrina, and the current financial crisis). Tocqueville speculated that the malleability of American government and law would create endless opportunity for the emergence of an essentially reactionary state: that is, a state itself brought into forceful activity as an effect of emergency. Seen in this light, emergency is less an interruption than a definition of the state so conceived.

Hosted by the Centre for American Studies at the University of Western Ontario, and organized by the Canadian Association for American Studies, this three–day multi–disciplinary conference encourages attendees to construe this theme broadly. Possible approaches to this theme might include: Broadcasting Crisis, Creating Crisis, Celebrity Emergency, Civil Liberties During Crisis, The Political Life of Emergency, The State of Triage, The Crisis of Privacy, Emerging Crisis, Crisis and Leviathan, From Anxiety to Panic, Becoming Undisturbed, Emergency Exit, Emergency Powers, Emergency Management, Rational Panic, Call 9/11. Case studies of specific crises and emergencies from American cultural, social and political history are welcome, but participants are also encouraged to think broadly and creatively about the meaning and purpose of “emergency” itself.

We invite scholars from the broad spectrum of American studies disciplines, including but by no means limited to history, political science, sociology, anthropology, First Nations/native–American studies, gender studies, gay/lesbian studies, literary studies, media studies, film studies, and art history and practice.

The conference organizers invite individual abstracts of 250 words or less, and a brief CV, by March 31, 2009. Complete panels on a topic are also welcome. Email submissions may be sent to: traister@uwo.ca. Hardcopy submissions may be sent to: CAAS Program Director, The Centre for American Studies, the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada N6A 5C2