Democracy and Difference: the US in Multidisciplinary and Comparative Perspectives. Papers from the 21st AISNA Conference

The volume collects contributions stretching from the Humanities to the Social Sciences and examines the challenging conjugation of two keywords in contemporary societies—democracy and difference. The overall project of this collection is to share knowledges and methodologies across disciplines, languages, and national cultures in order to investigate processes of homogenization and differentiation, and to embrace transnational, intercultural, and interdisciplinary perspectives. By exploring topics that are central to American Studies—including race/ethnicity, sex/gender, nationality, religion, language, landscape, migration, law, status, economy, dispossession, and expansion—and by engaging them both in English and Spanish, the collection aims to both foster cultural dialogue in an interconnected world and reflect the dynamism and instability of American Studies as a discipline that is constantly redrawn and redefined by a difficult yet fruitful interaction with diverse cultures, locations, and communities. This volume situates critique at the very heart of American Studies, not only to question and redraw the boundaries of this porous discipline, but also to point the way towards more hospitable configurations of the global world.