2008 Conference Call-for-Papers

8^th Biennial Conference

Puerto Rican Studies Association
October 1-4, 2008
Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe
San Juan, Puerto Rico

“Cartographies of Identities: Puerto Rico(ans) in the XXIst Century”

“Cartografías de identidades: Puerto Rico/rriqueños(as) en el siglo XXI”

The Puerto Rican Studies Association would like to invite its members and other interested parties to respond to this call for papers, panels, posters, workshops or roundtables for the 8th Conference of the PRSA.

2008 Conference Poster

Cartography as tool and metaphor enables us to reflect on the social and physical spaces that produce and frame – among other things – behaviors, struggles, violences, restrictions, signifying and re-signifying processes, as well as social categories and identifiers. Cartography triggers theoretical reflections that enable the analysis of differences, continuities and discontinuities of the geographical, social, historical, cultural, economic and political contexts where Puerto Ricanness is inserted. Multiple views of Globalization, Modernity and Post Modernity, force a discussion of the nation-state as an analytical category and socio-political space.

The relationship between social and material space – the territoriality/embodiment of the social, and the social context of the material – is the central theme of our conference. The social production of space implies limits, borders and adjacencies. It also provides bridges and access points to cross over from one space to another, without implying their stability. Indeed, they are necessarily unstable due to their historical contingencies: thus the trespassing, transgressing, carnavelesque, panopticisms, violences and invasions; the confusions and ambivalences, conflicts over adjacencies-identities, camouflages, simulacra and travestisms.  None of this works without visibility structures: such spaces require forms to make them visible and identifiable like sketches and plans, taxonomies, fences and walls, identity cards, passports, and phenotypes, among others.

In particular we are interested on focusing the following themes from a variety of disciplines, and disciplinary / trans-disciplinary perspectives.

• How nation and Puerto Rican/ness are defined within particular socio/geographical spaces. Who defines them, which social space/power is used to ground such definitions and for what/ whom is this definition taking place.
• Social spaces of identifying subjects. Spatial fissures and transgressions. Theoretical reflection on space and identifying categories.
• How meanings of race, ethnicity, gender, sexualities, economic strata and their intersections, differ in different locales and spaces. How geographical space frames the practices through which social actors produce aesthetic values, national identities, sexualities, races and genders.
• Mechanical, electronic and cybernetic spaces used as social and physical spaces to articulate and re-define social meanings.
• Physical and corporeal landscapes. Technologies, discourses and practices of the body.
• How are relationships between the local, regional, and global articulated within different Puerto Rican communities.
• The social and/or physical spaces of language, ideologies and politics and their limits, instabilities, visibilities, bridges or overflows.
• Cultural spaces: literature, theater, performance, visual arts, music and mass communications, i.e. television, radio, the music industry and cinema.
• How cultural and aesthetic production is defined from particular localities.
• The social and/or physical spaces of how communities are organized; political organizing and citizenship with their limits, instabilities, visibilities, bridges and overflows.
• The relationship of Puerto Rican communities with other communities and other nationalities in different geographical spaces in the Caribbean, the US and the Diaspora.
• The social and cultural consequences of Globalization, the transnational circulation of capital, material and symbolic goods, ideas, and people, over the social practices and production of theory.

Luis Aponte-Parés, PRSA Presidente
Gladys Jiménez Muñoz, PRSA Vice-Presidenta
Elizabeth Crespo Kebler, Presidenta, Comité de Programa