The 2010 National Conference will take place in Albuquerque, the largest metropolis in a state that will be celebrating the 400th anniversary of our republic's oldest capital city. Long depicted as a Tierra Encantada, a "Land of Enchantment," New Mexico is legendary for its azure skies and for the stark beauty of vistas that have inspired writers as eloquent as Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, and N. Scott Momaday, painters as diverse as Peter Hurd, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Fritz Scholder, Wild West personalities as colorful as Kit Carson, Billy the Kid, and Geronimo, and scientists as pivotal in their influence on current sensibilities as Robert H. Goddard, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Edward Teller.
In the 16th and 17th centuries the region's deserts, sierras, and cottonwood-lined streams were being traversed not only by natives such as the Apaches and Navajos but by conquistadors in search of what John Keats would memorably portray as "realms of gold." By 1610, when the Spanish erected a Governor's Palace and a San Miguel Mission in a settlement devoted to the "Holy Faith of St. Francis of Assisi," it was all but inevitable that a small, dusty villa would eventually become a multicultural destination for such fabled routes as the northbound Camino Real de Tierra Adentro and the westbound Santa Fe Trail. The latter would eventually prepare the ground for picturesque rail journeys and for a highway that would be immortalized in John Steinbeck's fiction and in one of Nat King Cole's most popular recordings.
While the earliest of these developments were occurring in the Sangre de Cristo foothills, a London playwright on the south bank of the Thames was responding to accounts of a shipwreck and a seemingly miraculous recovery off the coast of Bermuda. By the end of 1611 Shakespeare had transmuted this narrative into a Tempest that would prompt audiences to weigh the impact of a "brave new world" that was being explored by Europeans on the far side of the Atlantic. In due course Aldous Huxley, Antonin Dvorak, Aaron Copland, and other artists would contribute their chords to a veritable new-world symphony. Abraham Lincoln would allude to its potent symbolism when he pledged "a new birth of freedom" for the nation he cherished as "the last best hope of earth." John F. Kennedy would evoke its imagery in his call for a "New Frontier" in American statecraft. His brother Robert would do likewise when, drawing upon Tennyson's "Ulysses," he exhorted his fellow citizens "To Seek a Newer World." Echoes of a related impulse would come to the fore in George H. W. Bush's appeal for "A New World Order. " And in what must have come as a surprise to many of Henry Kissinger's associates, Richard Nixon's one-time Secretary of State would eventually foresee a fulfillment of that aspiration in the foreign-policy initiatives of Barack Obama.
"Make it new." So wrote Ezra Pound in a bold directive for Modernist poets. What many of us forget is that the writer who issued this manifesto was translating a passage from Confucius, a philosopher who'd flourished a hemisphere to the east and more than two and a half millennia in the past. We're reminded of such cross-fertilization every time we savor the latest fusion of cuisines in dining rooms that exemplify America's bracing heritage as a melting pot. And when we contemplate the remarkable diversity in How the West is One, a New Mexico Art Museum display whose juxtapositions comment on what a visitor to "The City Different" observes during a quick stroll around its bustling Plaza, we can't help comparing the impact of Joseph Traugott's provocative exhibition with the insights we derive from a brilliant, challenging volume like Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran.
As we prepare for our 2010 Federation gathering, an occasion when everyone will be asked to ponder the human ties, the connective tissues, that are integral to every aspect of the humanities, we urge participants to reflect upon the many ways in which each of us can relate our heritage, our histories, and our hopes to a quest for personal, institutional, and communal regeneration. We encourage attendees to think about the urgent needs of our country, and of a planet on which it becomes increasingly clear with every passing day that no society can behave as if it were, in John Donne's formulation, "an island, entire of itself." Bearing this in mind, we hope above all that each delegate will remember the responsibilities we bear for the tierra that sustains us - for the precious, marbled gem our initial forays into space have revealed as a "demi-Paradise" against the silent backdrop of an ever-deepening void.
If you have ideas for conference sessions, please visit the call for session proposals page .