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7 th Biennial MESEA Conference
The Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas

16 – 20 June 2010
University of Pécs, Hungary

Call for Papers
Travel, Trade and Ethnic Transformations

Travel, movement and mobility are essential in human life: they shape individualities, histories and the stories people tell. In particular, labor, commerce, exile, tourism, transnational and transcontinental migrations have led to the socio-political and cultural production of dominant images of subjectivities and nationhoods. People's identification with “imagined communities” and their experience with “encountered ones” has determined ethnicity's and diaspora's infinitely variable socio-political and cultural content. However, neither panethnicity nor transmigrant/postcolonial hybridity can resolve the crisis of a liberal commodified polity. Ideologies of difference and subjectivity need to be critically regrounded in the realities of global capitalism, political economy and the changing structures of institutional and disciplinary power. This conference, then, aims to focus on the ways that travel and trade contribute to the definition and redefinition of ethnic subjectivities in the realms of culture, politics, history, and sociology, economics and law, language, literature and the arts in Europe and the Americas. The following list of topics is meant to be suggestive rather than restrictive:

- Imperial Routes: Mapping a pan-European political sensibility as opposed to a racialist logic of civilization, sovereignty and self-government
- Travel, location, and race/ethnicity
- Kaleidoscopic ethnicity: Trade, migration and the formation of community identities
- Ethnicity and the politics of world trade
- Colonization and ethnicity
- Diasporic cultural forms and transcultural networks
- Diasporic and nativist identity formation – tension or co-existence?
- Cultural and social “rise” as conducive to cultural/social invisibility
- Cosmopolitan diasporas
- Cosmopolitanism in creative tension with the nation-state and assimilationist ideologies
- Deterritorialization vs. reterritorialization: De/racination in diaspora and the politics of origin
- Postethnicity – global travel and ethnic (re)contextualizations
- Diaspora and trans-ethnic solidarities, such as against racism, class, gender, social movements
- Feminist politics of location
- Gendering diasporas within diaspora communities and across trans-ethnic networks
- Language, religion, and the formation of local communities
- Immigration, intermarriage, and community solidarity
- The politics and poetics of population integration
- Discourses of displacement – routes vs roots
- Exile and postmodern migrants
- Travel, tourism and cultural politics
- Travel writing and ethnography
- Sites / Sights: Exhibitionism and commodification

Proposals can be submitted to our website between August 15 and November 15, 2009.

Inter/transnational and inter/transdisciplinary proposals as well as complete panels will be given preference.

Note that MESEA will award two Young Scholars Excellence Awards.

For more information please see: http://www.mesea.org