2009 AAAS CONFERENCE
2009 CALL FOR PAPERS
Challenging Inequalities: Nations, Races and Communities
The conference theme can be interpreted in two different ways. Political, economic and social inequalities among nations, races, and other communities are indeed challenging insofar as they have persisted to the present and continue to resist reduction. At the same time, the theme can also be understood as a call for scholars, students and community activists to develop ways to challenge inequalities in order to foster equality, justice and fairness among nations, races, and communities of various backgrounds, including ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation, and nationality.
Honolulu, and more generally Hawai‘i, provides an appropriate site for the Association for Asian American Studies annual conference because 2009 marks the fiftieth anniversary of statehood for Hawai‘i. The islands became a state in 1959 because of the unequal power relations between the nations of Hawai‘i and the United States that resulted in the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom in 1893 and its annexation as a U.S. territory in 1898. The fiftieth anniversary of statehood is not likely to be officially celebrated in Hawai‘i out of respect for the concerns of the Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) people who became U.S. colonial subjects after annexation. By contrast, some Asian American groups, such as Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans, have benefited substantially from statehood as evident from their dominant economic and political status in Hawai‘i. Our conference can serve as a forum to rethink the causes and differential consequences of the emerging American Empire in the Pacific and Asia in the late nineteenth century and its peremptory status in the affairs of Asian Americans and of Asian and Pacific Island peoples in the twentieth century, and to consider its possible decline in the current neoliberal age.
The historical injustices and violence of U.S. colonization of Hawai‘i and the contemporary marginalization of Kanaka Maoli in their homeland provide a political, economic and cultural context for rethinking other challenging inequalities that continue to plague us and compel us to develop appropriate means to contest them. Such inequalities, albeit constantly shifting, include those between the United States and Asian and Pacific nations, especially as a result of the economic, cultural and military globalization of the latter nations, including Hawai‘i, under the impetus of transnational capital. In response, nationalist movements, including the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, have emerged to resist such globalizing processes. What role can Asian Americanists play in our teaching, research, and community service in rethinking and challenging such global inequalities among nations and their peoples?
Inequalities among races include those between Asian Americans and other racial groups, including Pacific Islanders. In what is being referred to as his “A More Perfect Union” speech on March 18, 2008, Honolulu-born and raised Barack Obama described contemporary race relations as “a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years.” How then can we as academics and activists contest persisting racial inequalities and hierarchies? How do we challenge “color-blind racism” and appropriations of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s in limited ways that deny the persistence of vast racial inequalities? How can we develop collective strategies and coalitions toward a society based on tolerant and egalitarian race relations?
Inequalities among communities include those among and within Asian American groups based on ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual orientation. Women and gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities continue to face institutional hurdles that bar them from gaining equal treatment. Those inequalities certainly intersect with those based on nation and race (and with each other) and clearly indicate the social and cultural complexity of inequalities in society. How do such inequalities and their intersections challenge us to rethink our theoretical approaches and political strategies for resolving them?
Please join us in Honolulu in 2009 as we address the above and other significant questions and issues on challenging global, racial, ethnic, gender, class, and other inequalities. Complete panel submissions (with a minimum of three papers and a maximum of four) will be given priority, but individual paper submissions will also be considered. We invite submissions for workshops and roundtables as well.
Please note that all paper and panel applicants, including other paper presenters and discussants in a panel, must be members of the Association for Asian American Studies. If you are not an association member at the time of the submission deadline of October 31, 2008, you will have until January 1, 2009 to join by sending your payment and completed annual membership form to The John Hopkins University Press, the publisher of the association’s journal. The membership form is available on the AAAS website at http://www.aaastudies.org/forms/index.html. Note also that paper presenters and discussants must pay the conference registration fee prior to the conference in order to be included in the printed conference program.
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: OCTOBER 31, 2008.
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