Team Comp

The Tucson Summit was deeply inspiring and more than a little intimidating for many of us. People made humble jokes about "baby steps." Comparative work is hard to do, no matter the direction it takes. New languages are difficult and time-consuming to learn and new archives take time to explore, and the first summit made many of us worry about how much time it will take to get up to speed in new areas even as it excited us with all the possibilities of a more expansively comparative American studies.

But maybe we do not each individually need to master all this to keep developing the momentum from the first encounter. At the next summit, I would like to see us try some experimenting with research teams in place of traditionally conceived panels. What I envision is a group of inspired and energetic conference organizers who see themselves as team coordinators. It would be necessary for these people to command a joint expertise that spans the Americas. They would use their expertise and their networks to coordinate teams of scholars whose single areas of expertise match up provocatively with those of the other members of the panel teams (there might have to be an initial round of volunteering combined with a bit of creative recruiting). There could be teams grouped around topics, for instance: women's studies, postcolonial studies, poetry, religion and identity, hybridity, autobiography, diaspora, nation-state, manhood studies, scientific discourse, race, novelistic discourse, circumatlantic, intimacy, colonial discourse, religious discourses, and so on.

Once appointed, the team's job would be to figure out how to make their materials and approaches work comparatively and deliver a focused presentation on that subject at the next conference. There are any number of ways that this might develop in the doing. I am imagining teams of three to four, though perhaps it would be more effective in groups of two or three. What I would propose is that each person send the group the piece of their own scholarship they would want to start working from, and after every member has had time to read the others' articles or chapters, then a brainstorming session would happen—probably via email or conference call. Of course, it would be ideal if there were an organized way to bring the teams face-to-face to start the preliminary work.

The individual teams could each work out how they would develop a presentation: I can imagine each member presenting briefly on her or his primarymaterial, and then taking turns presenting a comparative analysis. Or maybe the group would want to develop a single paper for presentation. Perhaps some teams would want to suggest and make available advance readings, drawing on and perhaps adding to the original Summit Anthology. It would be ideal if the teams were working on their session before the programis composed, because the title of their session could indicate something about the orientation toward the material that the team is planning. If that became possible, participants might be able to sign up for panels in advance, with the understanding that they would prepare readings as suggested for the panels (there could even be an option to sign up, so that attendees could prepare for one or two panels and just observe at others as space permitted). Leaving a substantial chunk of time open for discussion would make everyone's advance preparation productive (and that means assigning session chairs with the courage and grace to enforce time limits on their panelists!).

This requires some substantial advance work for the program committee and the panelists. The advantage in this team model, it seems to me, is synergy. What seems most daunting about the challenge of the new Inter Americas American Studies is that there is so much catch-up to do for any one of us trained narrowly in a single discipline, from a single nation's historical vantage. Sharing our power—our best scholarly expertises and passions—will, I predict, give us a powerful second approach to the work of building toward a more institutionally focused and organized comparative Americas studies. Moreover, the team project...