This panel invites presentations that explore “extreme geographies”—sites at the limits of habitability and at the horizon of speculation—in literary, visual, and cinematic archives of Latin America. Drawing from David J. Nemeth’s working definition (entry in Encyclopedia of Geography, 2010), we consider both material environments beyond human thresholds, such as polar zones, tropical belts, deserts, volcanic craters, deep-sea trenches, and outer space, and imagined loci including utopias/dystopias, lost islands, fantastic and counterfactual frontiers.

Extreme geographies have often been the laboratories colonial and national projects extend their borders through territorial occupation, racialization, and resource extraction. In the Latin American context, examples include environmental determinism used to racialize Caribbean islands and the ideological “desertification” of Patagonia—cast simultaneously as wilderness requiring modern intervention and as a void that justifies dispossession of Indigenous peoples and knowledge.

We invite papers that analyze how different written and visual mediums represent extreme geographies to both expose and unsettle such totalizing projects, and to imagine alternative ecologies, sovereignties, and forms of kinship beyond conventional geopolitical borders and the human domain. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: extractivism and racial capitalism; infrastructures at the edge (ports, spaceports, pipelines, observatories, submarine cables); oceanic, planetary, and interplanetary imaginaries; Indigenous and Afro-diasporic epistemologies; speculative cartographies; horror, sci-fi, and other non-realist genres; and aesthetics of excess and opacity that resist colonization and domestication. 

LASA 2026 (Latin American Studies Association) will take place in Paris on 26-30 May, 2026.

If you're interested in joining the panel, please send a 250 word abstract and a short bio to:

Lu Han (lh664@cornell.edu) and

Salvador Alanis (salvador.alanis@utoronto.ca).

Abstracts accepted now through Sep 3rd, 2025.

For more information about LASA2026, see https://lasaweb.org/en/lasa2026/.