Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting

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CFP: Beyond Internationalism: More-than-national thinking at the twilight of Empire (1850-1950) - AAG 2016 San Francisco

Call for Papers: Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, San Francisco

29th March – 2nd April 2016

Beyond Internationalism: More-than-national thinking at the twilight of Empire (1850-1950)

Session organizers: Reshaad Durgahee and Benjamin Thorpe (University of Nottingham, UK)

Historical geography’s recent turn towards internationalism, fuelled by the challenge to escape forms of ‘methodological nationalism’, has productively opened up for analysis a range of historical networks, processes and discourses that transcend the bounds of the nation-state. While welcoming this development, this session seeks to build on this work by going ‘beyond internationalism’ in two key respects. Historically, we seek to embrace those expressions of more-than-national thinking that are not captured by a simple understanding of internationalism as the liberal alternative to imperialism. And conceptually, we seek to destabilize a political discourse (‘the international’) that now seems taken for granted, but was in the period in question in a state of extreme flux, with a host of alternative imaginings of the ordering of political space vying for supremacy.

This session will therefore bring together papers under an historical geographical umbrella, exploring forms of super‑,supra‑ and trans-nationalism that escape our common understanding and definition of internationalism. In particular, the session aims to look at forms of internationalism from both an imperial and subaltern perspective. How did those in the imperium try to reconcile (or, indeed, oppose) the spatiality of Empire with the new geographies and structures of an impending post-imperial world order? How were imperial more-than-national networks co-opted by sub-altern efforts to bring about this post-imperial world? And how were these more-than-national networks, processes and discourses conceptualized within (or against) the spatial imaginary of the time? 

We invite papers exploring this theme during the time period 1850-1950, on topics including, but not limited to:

Internationalist movements

Performing internationalism

Reconfiguring and challenging ‘the international’

Trans- versus inter-nationalism

Migration and diaspora patterns

Cultural legacies of migration

Subaltern connections across Empire

Imperial careering

Territorial expansion of national values

The post-imperial transformation of the networks, flows and nodes of Empire

Geographies beyond the state

Hybridization and Creolization

Submissions:  Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words by email to Reshaad Durgahee (reshaad.durgahee@nottingham.ac.uk ) by 20th October 2015. Successful submissions will be contacted by 24th October 2015 and will be expected to register and submit their abstracts online on the AAG website by 29th October 2015 ahead of the session proposal deadline which is 18th November 2015.