Thematic Panels

America, with its multiple narratives, landscapes, languages, and experiences, projects itself in time like a mosaic in movement: a mosaic of cartographies imagined over time and projected in the descriptions of travelers and scientists, in fiction and poetry, in the discourses of politicians and activists, and in the images of photographers, artists, and filmmakers.

The 5th IASA World Conference proposes to be a space for debating how different communities form senses of Americanness, originating from places of knowledge, politics, art, memory, and lived experience, where a possible "America" may be configured.

Subthemes –

 1. imagination and images
Visual configurations and their narrative and representational forms

2. memory and community
The “usable past”; strategies in the production of memory; representations of identities and otherness

3. geographies of power
Networks of power; games of political definitions; international protocols and treaties vis-à-vis the challenges of a globalized World

4. time and Americanness
Constructions of notions of americanness at different historical moments; being American; historical consciousness and the historicity of americanness in its different narrative forms

5. routes and ´scapes´
Narratives and textualities that configure culture in movement; forms of (re)presenting diversity in a hemisphere in transit, with its multiple dislocations and decenterings

6. traditions in perspective
Popular cultures, hibridizations, and cultural clashes in the construction of group identities of the deterritorialized.

7. possible modernities
The decentering of the axes of definition of modernity; crossed gazes in a world culture; processes of the production of senses of center/periphery as a two-way construction.