Arpilleras: Weaving Constellations in 21st-Century Latin American Women’s Writing
Drawing on the arpillera as both an aesthetic practice and a critical model, this seminar explores how 21st-century Latin American women’s writing can be read through constellations, transnational and uneven archives, and relational frameworks. Rather than organizing analysis along national or canonical lines, it approaches texts as dynamic assemblages that weave together bodies, territories, affects, and political histories.
A quarter into the twenty-first century, amid an increasingly dense and interconnected literary landscape of women’s writing across Latin America, the seminar foregrounds the importance of reading these works in relation. Without flattening the diversity of poetics, genres, textures, and voices that traverse the region, it advances a critical practice attentive to their points of contact, tension, and cross-pollination. Emphasizing processes of stitching, juxtaposition, and reassembly, the seminar considers how both literary texts and our interpretive methods trace connections across uneven circuits of visibility, linking diverse geographies, materials, scales, and languages.
Designed as a collaborative working seminar, participants will circulate papers in advance and engage in sustained discussion. The seminar welcomes contributions that reflect on methodology, archive-building, and comparative approaches, and that engage narrative, essayistic, visual, and hybrid forms. Participants will be expected to circulate drafts in advance and actively engage with each other’s work.
Presentations are welcome in Spanish, English, and Portuguese.
Session modality: only in-person panel.