| 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 organisers: 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 destabilise 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 conceptualised 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 ubmissions: Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words by email to Reshaad Durgahee (reshaad.durgahee@nottingham. Please note, a range of registration fees will apply and must be paid before the formal submission of abstracts to the AAG. —————————— |
