Announcement: Check out UT AMS Folks at ASA!

It's that time of year again--time for the annual American Studies Association Annual Meeting, which will be held in Washington D.C. from November 21-24. This year's theme is “Beyond the Logic of Debt, Toward an Ethics of Collective Dissent,” and a number of folks from the UT American Studies department will be representing AMS and ATX at this year's conference. For those of you who will be in and around D.C. this week, here's a list of not-to-be-missed presentations!ThursdayPh.D. candidate Andrea Gustavson will present in the "Photographing War, Picturing Dissent: Visualizing the Vietnam Conflict" panel on Thursday from 10:00 to 11:45am in the Georgetown West room with a paper titled "Snapshots of the Living-Room War: Consent and Critique in Soldier Photography of the Vietnam Conflict." In her presentation, Gustavson will consider snapshots from the Vietnam Center and Archive (VNCA) at Texas Tech University and the way these photographs "provide a visual record of the ways that war takes place day by day, depicting the ordinariness of life lived amidst violence and revealing the complex ways that Americans construct their own understandings of conflict."Shirley Thompson will present as part of the Material Culture Caucus on Thursday from 2:00 to 3:45pm in a panel called "Credit/Debit, Fealty/Faith: Doing, Subverting, and Archiving America's Business from the Antebellum Era to Jim Crow" that will take place in the Cardozo room. Dr. Thompson's paper is titled "As Though They Meant Something: Insurance Documents, Indebtedness, and African-American Freedom" and addresses the way "American wealth has long been predicated on a devaluation of blackness with consequences that persist to this day." She draws on archives of insurance documents that "allow historians to access the everyday calculus African-Americans used to edify their lives and build social networks in the early decades of the twentieth century."Ph.D. candidate Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa will present alongside Dr. Thompson in the "Credit/Debit, Fealty/Faith" panel with a paper titled "The First Cut is the Deepest: Financial Records and the Indebted Archive," in which she considers "what is lost when legal and accounting discourses govern what remains as evidence of a corporation, a public body or a personal life."FridayNicole Marie Guidotti-Hernandez, Associate Professor of American Studies and Co-Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at UT, will present in a panel on Borderland Intimacies on Friday from 8:00 to 9:45am in the Fairchild West room. Her paper, "The Homoerotics of Abjection: The Gaze of Leonard Nadel’s Placeless Bracero Photographs," examines a photo series from the Salinas Valley in 1956 and shows how  photos of the displaced men of the Bracero Program "register desire, sexuality, and longing out of the abject subject position."A. Naomi Paik will also present on Friday present on Friday from 8:00 to 9:45amin a panel on Imperialism, Freedom, Refuge, Reparation, which will take place in the Gunston East room. Paik's paper is titled "War, Labor, and the Gift of Citizenship" and it "examines intersections of U.S. empire, labor exploitation, and the contradictory debts they produce by tracing the movements of Japanese Latin Americans extradited and imprisoned by the U.S. state during World War II."Our department chair, Elizabeth Engelhardt, will be a speaker on the ASA Committee on American Studies Departments, Programs and Centers panel, "Strategies for Intra-Institutional Alliances to Ensure Program Stability," on Friday from 10:45 to 12:30pm in the Cardozo room.Ph.D. candidate Sean Cashbaugh will present as part of the Occupy Imaginaries panel on Friday from 4:00 to 5:45pm in the Monroe room. Cashbaugh's paper, "Orientation and Resonance in a Radical Imaginary: Avant-Garde, Underground, Occupy," connects the Occupy movement to "previous movements that troubled conventional ideas about political organization, such as the “avant-garde” of the early twentieth century and the mid-twentieth century “underground.”Also from 4:00 to 5:45pm, Ph.D. candidate Jennifer Kelly will present as part of the panel she organized, "Tourism, Debt, and Disaster: The Politics of Touring the Toxic Everyday" in the Gunston East room. Kelly's paper is titled "Your Work is Not Here: Solidarity Tourism in Occupied Palestine" and explores the way " Palestinian organizers and activists increasingly utilize the mobility of internationals to communicate their message," where she addresses "what light an analysis of solidarity tourism in Palestine can shed on questions of solidarity, neoliberal investments, settler-colonialism, military occupation, and anti-colonial collective dissent."SaturdayCary Cordova will present in a panel titled, "Mapping Race and Revolution in the Americas: Literary and Political Syntheses from WWII to the War on Terror" on Saturday from 8:00 to 9:45am in the Cardozo room. Dr. Cordova's paper, "A Psychogeography of Latina/o Radicalism: The Politics of Latina/o Landscapes," explores "how Latinas/os can be seen, or not seen in the nation’s physical spaces."Ph.D. candidate Irene Garza will present as part of the War and Peace Studies Caucus on Saturday from 10:00 to 11:45am in a panel titled "Beyond Blood and Treasure: Reconceptualizing War Debt I (Redress and Repayment)" in the Georgetown East room. Garza's paper, "Every(Body) is a Hero: Calculating Life and Death among Latina/o Iraq War Veterans," looks at the interconnections between the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, Latinas/os, and the American military. Latina/o veterans now engaged in the battle to build a full-service medical facility in the Valley.SundayOn Sunday morning from 8:00 to 9:45am, graduate student Robert Oxford will present as part of the "Critical University Studies I: Mortgaging Higher Education" panel in the Lincoln West room with his paper titled, "From Occupy to Strike Debt: Organizing Success and Struggles." Oxford will explore "the connection between personal indebtedness, access to the American middle class, labor and finance capital."Ph.D. candidate Lily Laux will present her paper, "Teaching Texas: Disguising Debt in the School to Prison Pipeline," in a panel on Neo/Colonial Pedagogies and the Creation of Indebted Knowledges in the American Century. Laux's panel will take place on Sunday from 12:00 to 1:45pm in the Lincoln West room, and she will address the "legislative construction of institutionalized education" in Texas.Ph.D. candidate Elissa Underwood will also present on Sunday from 12:00 to 1:45pm in a panel titled "Confronting Carceral America: Activist Responses to the Punitive Logics of Debt" in the Fairchild East room. Underwood will present her paper, "The Carceral Kitchen: A Recipe for Change in the Punitive State?," which considers the way "food and foodways provide unique lenses by which to understand and interrogate" the carceral logic that "label[s] people and communities of color both exploitable and disposable" and resistance to this logic in activist carceral kitchens.

Grad Research: Histories and Highways in Washington, DC

Once the holiday festivities, post-Christmas sale shopping, family fun and new year's shenanigans quieted down, I snuck off to the MLK library down in Gallery Place in Washington, DC, to spend a few days digging around in their voluminous community archives collection.  It was awesome.  I'm working on a piece on DC's anti-freeway movement, and hoo boy does the DC Public Library have a lot of great stuff!  Not only do they have an incredible collection of photographs, DC City Council records, and DC-area newspapers large and small - they also have 42.5 linear feet worth of clippings, flyers, hearing transcripts, correspondence, maps, picket signs and all manner of other goodies donated by the Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis (ECTC), an interracial anti-freeway group that leveraged the social upheavals of the 1960s to fight freeways in DC and to rewrite eminent domain legislation in the process.  Needless to say, I was psyched.The ECTC formed in the mid-1960s, when DC and Maryland attempted to build the ten-lane North Central Freeway right through the heart of DC's Northeast quadrant.  The Freeway was purportedly part of a much larger interstate project.  Back in the mid-1950s, fueled by some alchemical combination of increased economic prosperity, a WWII-era "mega-project" mindset, and various automobile-oriented advocacy groups, Eisenhower's "highwaymen" had begun to draw up and build what we know today as the National Interstate System - that vast network of highways that connects the nation and allows high-speed traffic to flow seamlessly from one city to the next nation-wide.  By the early 1960s, many of the rural stretches had been completed, and some cities - like Austin - even featured highways cutting right through the center of town.Not so in DC.  By 1964, I-95, the major highway that runs the length of the East Coast, approached DC from both Virginia and Maryland, but on both sides it stopped abruptly ten miles outside of town at the newly completed Capital Beltway.  Drivers wanting to enter the city itself had to leave the highway and navigate its surface streets, which, as DC's burgeoning population began to spill out into the Maryland and Virginia suburbs and long-distance road travel to and from the city became more common, was causing more than a little congestion.  And nothing makes a highway engineer more frustrated than congestion.  So the District Highway Department began to plan a network of intra-city freeways.  And, when the wealthy, white, well-connected residents of DC's Northwest quadrant flat-out rejected any proposals to put freeways in their neck of the woods, highway planners slyly relocated freeway plans to Northeast, where the population was poorer, more diverse, less-connected to the usual channels, and thus supposedly less able to resist the overtures of the highwaymen.  In late 1964, expecting an open-and-shut case, the Maryland and DC highway departments drew up plans for a ten-lane North Central Freeway through Northeast and hid a small announcement about a public hearing in the back pages of the Washington Post.Thank god for all those crazy old people with nothing to do but sit around and read back pages of the Washington Post!  That first public hearing drew more than 700 furious residents, nearly all of whom were vehemently opposed to the freeway - or any freeway, for that matter.  As it turned out, it also kicked off a ten year long struggle to keep the freeway out and bring rapid transit in instead.This is where the ECTC comes in.  Building on pre-existing neighborhood organizations and leveraging national movements like black power and environmentalism, they mobilized DC residents to protest the freeway, to fight the highwaymen, to testify before congress and to harass the crap out of DC's Mayor and City Council.  They also had some pretty amazing graphic designers on their side.  Check this out:Pigs eating at a trough of highway-related exploitation!  Downtown Progress was a business organization that supported building freeways in DC in hopes of bringing suburban dollars back to the city's central business district:Those same exploiters doing a number on "This Land is Your Land!"  This one vents their frustration at the collusion between big business and politics and the expense of the lives of the people in the path of the highway.  And yes, they had lyrics for the entire song.And this on is one of the ECTC's more famous posters, at least locally, featuring their slogan:What's particularly interesting about this last one is that the ECTC quickly grasped the racial implications of moving a freeway from Northwest to Northeast and made race a central part of its campaign against the freeway from the get-go, but it wasn't until the 1968 riots that the Federal government was willing to admit that a) the ECTC was right and b) in the late 1960s, DC's integrated neighborhoods had at least as much political clout as its white ones because they had the weight of the entire Civil Rights movement behind them.  Really, a genius move on the part of the ECTC.And, together with all of their other mobilization and communication tactics, an effective one: the North Central Freeway was never built, the Metro's Red Line runs along the CSX tracks near where the freeway would have been, and the Federal government has long since stopped trying to build highways anywhere near our fine nation's capital - or in any other major city, for that matter.These days, it's better to put those highway funds to good use in building a bicycle network, anyway.