Call for Papers: Themed Issue of aspeers on “American Youth”

When Theodore Roosevelt spoke of America as a “young giant of the West,” a “nation glorious in youth and strength,” at the Republican National Convention in 1900, he inserted himself into a long rhetorical tradition: Whether in promise or in criticism, identifying ‘youth’ with America and calling the US a nation that is yet to grow up constitutes a well-established trope in discussions of ‘Americanness.’ At the same time, adolescence and youth are core concepts at the heart of American literature and culture, and they are at the center of many contemporary debates. From the ‘American Dream,’ a coming-of-age story of sorts, to debates about the education sector, from moral panics about ‘juvenile delinquency’ to stories about America’s youngest entrepreneurs, and from Huckleberry Finn to the controversial No Child Left Behind Act, childhood and adolescence are focal lenses in thinking about ‘America,’ inviting at least two complementary perspectives: one in which youth is a trope frequently tied to ‘America’ and one in which youth is a concern with deep cultural resonance in American culture.

For its ninth issue, aspeers thus dedicates the topical section to “American Youth” and invites European graduate students to critically and analytically explore the particular relationship between notions of youth and American culture. With a host of disciplines—ranging from political science and history to medicine, legal studies, literary and cultural studies, economy, and beyond—devoting scholarship to this topic, aspeers welcomes papers from the various fields, methodologies, and approaches that comprise American studies as well as inter- and transdisciplinary submissions. Potential paper topics could cover (but are not limited to):

• explorations of the role of youth, childhood, or adolescence in American literature, broadly conceived, including movies, novels, video games, TV shows, graphic novels, or other texts that talk about coming of age
• discussions of the cultural history of childhood, of notions of youth, or of growing up as they intersect with categories of difference such as race, class, or gender
• analyses of the politics of childhood, be they contemporary or historical, and on how these speak of social dynamics within American society
• papers that approach youth via its complementary ‘other,’ (old) age

aspeers, the first and currently only graduate-level peer-reviewed journal of European American studies, encourages fellow MA students from all fields to reflect on the diverse aspects and implications of youth in American culture.

Deadline for submissions: 18 October 2015

At www.aspeers.com/2016 you can find additional information as well as the submission guidelines.