Panel CFPs: 2016 Irish Association for American Studies/British Association of American Studies Conference

Two Panel Call For Papers at the 2016 Irish Association for American Studies/British Association of American Studies Conference at Queen’s University, Belfast (7-9 April 2016)

Border Crossings and Revolutions

Scholarship on the Mexican-American border has dominated the field of border studies for the past forty years, from the publication of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera in 1987 to the present. Yet the forty-ninth parallel remains an under-examined yet critical divide, separating Indigenous tribes and cultivating distinct colonial and neo-colonial histories in both Canada and the United States. Richard Ford’s most recent novel, Canada, examines the complex relationship of America to its northern neighbour, focusing on how one young white boy remakes his identity once he has crossed the 49th parallel, albeit with relative ease. While the novel portrays the Prairies and later Central Canada, looking specifically at the Windsor-Detroit border, Ford offers a distinctly American vision of Canada. Using the theme of border-crossings and revolutions (and recalling that during the American Revolution, many British Loyalists fled northward to what was to become British North America), we are interested in papers that consider the relevance of the Canada-US border from an American Studies perspective.