Frontiers and Wastelands: Redefining the Nation in US Popular Culture to be hosted by the Center for American Studies, University of Southern Denmark (SDU) on March 28, 2023.The seminar will focus on how the American imagination has shaped—and, in turn, has been shaped by—its frontiers and borderlands, marked by an intrinsic peripheral quality, sociocultural porosity, and a diverse range of experiences and identities. We invite reflections on the multimodal representations of the US borderlands and frontier experience in popular culture and discourses, focusing on the diversity of identities, liminality, and disenfranchised experiences of Americanness, as well as the construction of borders as means to define the US national imaginary.
To participate with your presentation (which should last about 12–15min), please apply sending a tentative title and abstract (ca. 150 words long) to popmec.research@gmail.comby February 24. Proposals will be accepted / rejected shortly after submission, to allow you to organize your travel in the best way possible.
You can find more details in the attached pdf and on the webpage https://www.popmec.com/frontiers-and-wastelands/.
The event is organized by the Center for American Studies, with the collaboration of the PopMeC Association for US Popular Culture Studies and the Instituto Franklin-UAH.