Call for Papers: From Segregation to Integration: German-Language Communities in Latin America and their Interconnections with other Cultures, International Congress of Americanists (ICA) University Francisco Gavidia, San Salvador, July 12-17, 2015.

We are seeking participants for a symposium tentatively titled: “From Segregation to Integration: German-Language Communities in Latin America and their Interconnections with other Cultures” to be held at the 2015 meeting of the International Congress of Americanists (further information on the ICA: http://www.ica55.ufg.edu.sv/)

Much academic work on German-speakers in Latin America has focused on the initial cultural and structural isolation of their communities within their host societies. Much less has been written on their interactions with other ethnic minorities as well as local cultures and societies over a longer durée. Our goal is to delve deeper into such relationships and to think through the kinds of identities that were formed during the mutual penetration of German and non-German communities across Latin America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the same time, we also hope to use this meeting to bring the historiographical and theoretical traditions of European and Latin American history into dialog, and to move beyond the confines of national histories as well as current colonial and postcolonial theories. The ICA’s international character and the focus of the 2015 meeting, “Conflict, Peace, and the Construction of Identities in the Americas,” offers us the perfect setting for these endeavors.

We are seeking contributions from scholars interested in exploring formal and informal interconnections and relationships between German immigrants and Latin American cultures and societies. We would welcome proposals that engage these questions at both micro and macro levels of analysis, and we are particularly interested in studies that focus on strategies developed by these ethnic minorities to negotiate the social stratifications of their host societies (with greater and lesser degrees of success). We are also quite interested in comparative analysis of representations of “la alemanidad“ across Central and South America—especially the production of those ideas, receptions of those representations, and efforts to counter and refute them.

We are planning to organize a bilingual symposium (English and Spanish). Scholars interested in participating in this symposium should send a title, a 500 word proposal, a short CV, affiliation and contact information, and 5 keywords (necessary for the applications) before 15 March 2014 to the organizers Alma Durán-Merk (University of Augsburg, Germany) and H. Glenn Penny (University of Iowa, USA): alma.duran@phil.uni-augsburg.de and h-penny@uiowa.edu. Please indicate as well if you would be willing to act as a commentator.