4thBiennial U.S. Latinx Literary Theory and Criticism Conference

“Transamerican Reticulations: Towards a Latinx Theory of Hemispheric Literatures” 

April 25-27, 2019

John Jay College

*Abstracts Due: January 14th, 2019*

Conference website: http://emaze.me/latlitconfnyc#Home

Children are being ripped from their parents’ arms at the border.  Refugees fleeing from violence are being turned away.  Walls are being erected.  Thousands of people have died from the state’s deliberate neglect of victims of natural disaster. Whether U.S. citizens, refugees, or stateless migrants, we have witnessed how Latinx communities contend with the anti-Latinx policies of the U.S. racial state and its trouncing of established human rights law. The daily indignities of militarized border enforcement and virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric mark the current political moment as yet another phase in the United States’ enduring history of violent exclusionary practice and racist xenophobic ideology and public policy.  What lessons do Latinx literatures offer in this turbulent moment? How does the transnational, transcultural, and intertextual orientation of Latinx literatures shed an ethical light on the political narcissism of our time?  In this context of nationalist retrenchment, Latinxs become atravesados/as/xs in the Anzalduan sense of the word. The lived realities of criminal abandonment and violent exclusion require us to renew our focus on borders and boundaries to glean generous tropes that imaginatively interlink the Americas in novel, more just, ways.  Prompted by a sensibility of relation, in the Glissantian sense, Latinx writers compel us to reimagine the Americas as a network of interarticulated geographies marked by the insistent crossings of cultures, literatures, and decolonial histories.  Through this generous vision, this conference claims, Latinx literature stages interamerican encounters between bodies, expressive modalities, and diverse traditions, forging the theoretical ground for a reticulated theory of the Americas in the 21stcentury.

The 4thBiennial Conference on Latinx Literary Theory and Criticism will convene conversations that can help us imagine communities beyond the limits of the nation-state that constitute the Western hemisphere.  We propose the symbolically rich notion of reticulation to re-examine the concept of home in order to resist national imperatives that have framed binary conceptualizations of diasporic and migratory identities.  We call for papers that discuss how borders are instituted and maintained and how the work of Latinx authors and artists challenge artificial, yet violently enforced, geopolitical borders.  If Latinx literatures exhort us to imagine the Americas through an expansive lens of Transamericanity, to use Jose David Saldivar’s resonant concept, then it prevails on us to attend to the affective, legal, political, cultural, material, spiritual, historical, and linguistic practices between peoples and the geographies they inhabit. We welcome discussions on transamerican, transfrontera, isthmian, Antillean and archipelagic American frameworks that help us understand the complex political and aesthetic visions of relationality and diasporicity that circulate within Latinx literature.  We look forward to hosting papers that range from inquiries on citizenship and statelessness to analyses on clandestine crossings and fence logics.  We also welcome comparative analyses of literatures from the Americas presented in native or colonial languages and papers that endeavor to help us explore diverse Latinx literatures with our students. As always, the biennial conference is the place and venue to have those in-depth conversations about Latinx literature that enable the formation of networks, rigorous debate, and the testing of theoretical formulations and critical readings of the widening field of Latinx literary and cultural production.

Topics May Include: 

Il/legalities and re-imagining theories of justice

Thickening borders

Settler colonial, postcolonial and decolonial

Circum-Caribbean, transatlantic ties

Literary revanchism 

Afro-Latinx, Afro-Antillean

World-systems analysis

Coloniality

Alienation 

Anarchism in the Americas

Statelessness or a hemisphere without boundaries

transAmericanity

Global South

Modernity

Hybrid forms

Longing

The Stranger

Geographies of Home

Corporeal geographies

Im/mobilities

transculturation

Human rights regimes

National belonging

Hemispheric un/moorings

Critical regionalism

Global statecraft of US prison regime

Processes of invisibilization and criminalization

Border militarization

Formations of panethnic identities or Latininidades

Histories and archival memories

Political geographies

Spatial imaginations

Contact zones

Memory, nostalgia

Diasporas

Forced dispersals

Cosmopolitanisms

Hospitalities

Transfrontera solidarities

Transnational feminisms

Ethics and hospitality

Trans-languaging

Transmedia storytelling

Transgender and the body

Intersectionalities

Colonizing of Nature

Humans, Animals and the collapse of the subject

Abstracts Due: January 14th, 2019

Submit at conference website: emaze.me/latlitconfnyc

*We accept panel proposals and abstracts in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Creole, and Indigenous languages

Thursday April 25, 2019:

Keynote: Lorgia García-Peña, Harvard University 5:00-6:30 

Reception 6:45-7:45

Friday April 26, 2019:

Panels 9am-5pm

Saturday April 27, 2019: 

Panels 9am-5pm

Literary Panel 5:30-7pm

Moderator, José David Saldívar, Stanford University 

Author, Myriam Chancy 

Author, Daniel Alarcón 

Author, Eduardo C. Corral 

Author, Yuri Herrera

Reception 7:15-8:15

Conference Fees:

full-time and adjunct faculty: $175.00 

late registration: 200.00

graduate students $100.00

undergraduates: $20.00

non-presenters: $50.00

John Jay students: free