Call for Contributions

RSAJournal: Rivista di Studi Americani, the official journal of the Italian Association for North American Studies (Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord-Americani – AISNA) will feature a special section, edited by the general editor of RSAJournal, Valerio Massimo De Angelis, and by the Director of the Centro Altreitalie (Torino), Maddalena Tirabassi, on Mobilities and Citizenship: Rethinking Migrations, Individual and Collective Civil Rights, and their Representations in American History and Culture from the Colonial Age to the Present

In February 2018, the mission statement of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a federal agency charged with immigrant affairs, was radically changed, and the words “America’s promise as a nation of immigrants,” promoting “an awareness and understanding of citizenship” along with “ensuring the integrity of our immigration system,” were deleted, to be substituted with the intimation that the immigration policy of the USA must tend towards “adjudicating requests for immigrant benefits” while “protecting Americans” and “securing the homeland.” This stark opposition between “immigrants” and “Americans” tells a lot about the recent and brutal dismantling of what since the founding of the first English Colonies in North America has always been one of the central tenets of the American concept of national identity, citizenship, and civil rights – i.e., the inextricable interconnection between the endless flow of migration waves and the necessity to accomodate them in a social and political structure inevitably bound to continually redefine itself and the set of duties and rights upon which belonging to “America” as its citizens is based.

 

The special section aims at exploring the complex and contradictory development of this dynamics, and the ways in which it has been represented, celebrated and criticized by American culture. All disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches are welcome, and topics may include, but are not limited to:

 

Early European migrations to North America

Citizenship in Colonial British America

Inner migrations before the Revolution

The American Revolution and transatlantic mobilities

Migrations in the early Republic

The new American citizen

Forced migrations – slavery and (non-)citizenship

Racial theories, migrations and removals in Jacksonian America

Manifest Destiny and westward movements

The redefinition of citizenship before and after the Civil War

Postbellum inner migrations

The new technologies of mobility and the moving citizen

Early 20th-century mass migrations and the “melting” of American citizenship

20th-century American Imperialism, migrations and citizenship

Migrations between the two World Wars

Citizenship on the front – military mobilities

The Cold War and the “fixing” of Americannes

The mobility of the Civil Rights movement(s)

Ethnicities on the move – global diasporas and American citizenship

The “mobile” postmodern citizen

Virtual mobility and virtual citizenship

Migrants and citizens in the Trump era

Download Call in PDF

If you are interested in submitting an article, please send to vmdeangelis@gmail.comand madtirabassi@gmail.coma title, a very brief abstract of the article (10 lines max), and a short biographical sketch by December 10, and we will get back to you by December 24. The deadline for article submissions by authors whose titles and abstracts have been accepted is April 15, 2019.

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