The Politics of Refusal and Impossibility in Arab American Studies
Arab American Studies Association 2020 Triennial Conference
April 3rd-5th, 2020
San Diego State University
San Diego, CA
The Arab American Studies Association invites panel, paper, and roundtable proposals for its 2020 triennial conference on the theme of the politics of refusal and impossibility, to be held at San Diego State University. Drawing inspiration from our meeting in Southern California, the conference will attend to questions related to the im/permeability of borders; refugee status and asylum; transnational movements, alliances, and migrations; and the material consequences of these politics for the life experiences of Arab Americans throughout the transnational Americas. As an interdisciplinary organization, we seek papers on politics, society, and culture from across disciplines, including anthropology, cultural studies, economics, history, law, literature, philosophy, politics, psychology, public health, religion, and sociology.
Recent prohibitive immigration, asylum, and refugee policies—such as the recent “Muslim Travel Ban” Executive Order and the demand for a border wall with Mexico—recall Evelyn Alsultany and Ella Shohat’s 2013 statement that the fixation on securing the United States’ borders is ultimately grounded in policies that conflate Arab, Muslim, and Latin American identities in the national discourse: “For the superpatriotic defenders of the border, the wall between Mexico and the Untied States offers a fortification not only against the Latin South but also against the Arab/Muslim East…scorn for Mexican-American ‘greasers’ overlaps with both 9/11 and the War on Terror as an overarching rhetorical framework.”
Considering the intersections of identity and policy raised by Alsultany and Shohat, we begin from a place of skepticism about the existing frameworks through which the Arab American experience has been understood to imagine new theoretical possibilities and paradigms. Our conference theme seeks to address the material and lived realities of Arab Americans and associated communities (such as Iranian, Afghan, and Pakistani Americans) who are seeking access to family reunification, immigration assistance, legal representation, health care, education, and employment. Further, we ask how the militarization of the US/Mexico border, the US/Canada border, and all points of entry (for example, at airports) impact migration, asylum, and family reunification for these groups?
Mindful of the hazards of false equivalences and unexamined hierarchies, AASA 2020 is similarly interested in exploring what Sunaina Maira calls “shape-shifting solidarities” (2018) to ask what strategic solidarity might look like. What coalitions can be forged with other communities of color in the Americas who experience similar challenges? How do strategic Black/Arab, Asian/Arab, Latinx/Arab and Indigenous/Arab solidarities (to name a few) help us to think about new directions for the field?
List of Themes
- technologies of surveillance, as well as strategies of counterveillance/sousveillance
- the spaces and forms of resistance created by Arab American communities
- comparative militarisms/examinations of enclosure and investigations of detention
- questions of migration, displacement, asylum, and refugee status
- solidarities and the problematics of solidarity
- contagion and the accessibility of health care
- feminist, queer, and crip Arab/Arab American futurities
Submissions and Contact
Please submit abstracts for papers, panels, and roundtables to easychair.org/cfp/AASA2020 by the new deadline of October 15, 2019. Panel and roundtable abstracts should include a 500 word panel/roundtable description (as well as the titles of all individual papers included for panels). Individual paper abstracts should not exceed 300 words.
