2012 Conference Call-for-Papers (EXPIRED)

10th Biennial Conference

Puerto Rican Studies Association (PRSA)
October 24–28, 2012
University at Albany – State University of New York (SUNY)

Call for Papers, Panels and Presentations

BORICUAS AND OTHER BORDER CROSSERS: OF DIASPORAS AND LATINIDADES

Marking PRSA’s Twentieth Anniversary.

The Puerto Rican Studies Association’s conference meeting of October, 2012 marked the 20th anniversary of PRSA’s sustained and continuing scholarly examination and study of the national and distinctively transnational experience of Puerto Rican people.

Below is the Call-for-Papers for our 2012 Conference (expired).

Unexpectedly emerging as pioneers of the earliest, most enduring and continuous of the great pre- and post-World War II migrations to the United States from the Caribbean and Latin America is a decisively defining element of that experience.

Beyond its vital daily unfolding and dramatic, continuing growth, the population of the diaspora now actually exceeds even that most recently and officially recorded for Puerto Rico itself. Significantly adding to the numbers of Mexicans and their Chicano descendents for whom North America had already long been ancestral home, Puerto Ricans, in the decades immediately before and after PRSA’s founding, would themselves be joined by the rapidly developing new national diasporic peoples from the wider Caribbean (including the Anglophone, Francophone, Dutch-speaking and their corresponding Creoles), Central and South America. Latinos/as in the United States, who in 2010 reached 50.5 million, representing 16% of the total U.S. population, in consequence, now stand as at once the most richly various, diverse and singular, geographically dispersed and unified, strategically situated, and increasingly unignorable and effectively paradigm-shifting segment of the U.S. national landscape and within their own national polities, both at “home” and “abroad.”

OUR TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY CONFERENCE THEME(S)

Taking as a point of departure the experience of Puerto Ricans as bordercrossers, this Conference wishes also to locate them in relation to a complexly shared Latino experience of multiple and overlapping diasporas—and (given the historical context of the iconic sites and patterns of Puerto Rican settlement in the United States) in particular other Afro-descended communities—, their shifting definitions and perceptions of “nation,” “nationality” and “cultural citizenship” and what may be these definitions’ promise, impasses, dilemmas, portents, and potentialities. We aim to explore the ways in which Latinos/as, other peoples of diaspora, and Puerto Ricans centrally among them, have and continue to defy, creatively to challenge and unprecedentedly to reimagine—on the island no less than in the diaspora—existing social, cultural, and political boundaries, arrangements, and directing assumptions.

Building on grounded scholarship in Puerto Rican Studies to critically reflect upon how diasporic encounters, practices, convergences, intersections and transformations compel movement across and beyond previously established territories, borders, and jurisdictions, as well as academic and disciplinary frontiers, we seek papers, panels and presentations which focus on, highlight and examine the many dimensions and variant dynamics of these “border crossings” and the Boricua/Latino realities that come of them.

Dominican-Puerto Rican percussionist at a neighborhood performance in Parcelas El Coco, Salinas, Puerto Rico, December 2006

Dominican-Puerto Rican percussionist at a neighborhood performance in Parcelas El Coco, Salinas, Puerto Rico, December 2006

We propose similarly to explore the new puertorriqueñidades emerging from multiple diasporic experiences. And aim, as well, to engage theoretical and methodological approaches which cut comparatively across Puerto Rican, Latino and other ethnic studies fields to scrutinize the intersection of colonial subjectivities, gender and sexuality, race, class and like categories too often obscured, minimized, or hidden in representations of Puerto Ricans and Latino/as and in the design and implementation of social policy directed at these communities. Tacitly and often violently, these representations continue to fuel and sustain existing social inequities.

By encouraging and drawing on integrative, transdisciplinary approaches we want to draw attention to the multiple strategies employed by Puerto Ricans and others to both defy and challenge such representations and their consequences. By analyzing discursive as well as visually arresting narratives, practices, and social relations, this conference seeks finally to examine and accentuate how the social formation of our many and particular puertorriqueñidades are simultaneously constitutive of and constituted by broader latinidades.

How we employ these new understandings to the implications of our past, current, and emergent experience and effectively towards the development of policies more fully apt and adequate to the challenges and urgencies of our contemporary sociopolitical realities is, of course, our overarching preoccupation and concern.

A short, merely suggestive list of possible themes might include, but would certainly not be limited to, any and all of the following:

  • Overlapping Diasporas
  • Cross or Multiple Ethnicities: MexiRicans, DominiRicans, Afro-Puerto Ricans, PuertoLatinos…
  • Citizenship
  • National Identities
  • Social Mobility and Containment
  • Musical Fusions
  • Religious Syncretisms
  • Racial Passing
  • Class “Slumming”
  • Reverse Migrations
  • Remittances (monetary, cultural, etc.), their Role, and their Impact
  • Crossing Linguistic Borders (Bilingual Education, Multilingual Texts)
  • The Politics of Translation
  • Puerto Ricans and African American Communities
  • Puerto Ricans, Haitians, and West Indians
  • The (BWI, Cuban, Dominican and/or Haitian Diaspora) in Puerto Rico
  • Gender Bending
  • Disparities in Health, Education, and Labor
  • Political Participation, Blocs, and Alliances
  • Military Service, Diaspora, and Settlement
  • Latinos/as and the Prison Complex
  • Comparative Economic Policies and Practices in Puerto Rico and Globally

We encourage submissions from the full array of communities that variously make up and give distinctive shape and texture to the Puerto Rican experience, its critical study and examination, from university and college faculty and independent scholars, to teachers and intellectual workers and graduate students in any variety of fields, to community and labor organizers, activists, and artists.

The submission of proposals for panels, individual papers and other presentations to be selected for the 2012 Conference Program is contingent upon the payment of PRSA 2011-2012 membership dues by all members of proposed panels and other sessions, as well as by everyone submitting an individual paper proposal.

The deadline for submitting proposals for PRSA’s 2012 conference was February 15, 2012.

CAREER PLANNING AND THE PROFESSION WORKSHOPS

In addition to its conference program of panels, papers, presentations and exhibits, the PRSA will also once again be sponsoring clinics designed to provide junior faculty and advanced graduate students with professional development workshops intended to assist in the career planning of younger scholars whose work and research projects focus on Puerto Rico, Puerto Ricans and their communities, and Puerto Rican Studies. These will include workshops on the development of a dossier for positions in the academy, the tenure, and promotion process, as well as on the history of PRSA and its contributions to intellectual life and collaborative community work. Generally, workshops will take on Thursday, October 25, 2012. Further details forthcoming.

 

Updated on February 21, 2013.

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