Nineteenth-century Latin American culture is laden with scenes of deception. The husband who discovers his wife in the arms of another man; the police officer who arrests a male suspect only to find, beneath their trousers, the lace of a dress; the aristocrat whose presumed whiteness is exposed as racial passing—such episodes erupt across novels, short stories, newspapers, and legal archives. Their conclusions are equally familiar: those who deceive are made to suffer, while those who survive their exposure are expected to perform repentance, shame, or moral redemption. Thus understood, these narratives operate as cautionary tales that delineate the moral, racial, gendered, and class boundaries upon which the nation depended. 

This panel invites participants to consider a different archive: narratives which delight in deception. Narratives which place the pleasure of deceit at the fore. We linger on stories and histories in which the discovery of deception does not produce shame or penance, but rather reveals the allure of the unrepentant and the duplicitous. In this panel, we ask what becomes visible when our attention shifts from deception as a shameful transgression to the pleasures of disguise, concealment, fraud, and passing and the narrative suspense they generate. This panel asks: What happens when narratives of deception teach the “wrong” lesson? How might attention to the pleasure of transgression reshape our understanding of the moralizing role of deceit in nineteenth-century cultural production? And what happens when the act of deception has no other purpose than the pleasure of deceit itself?

For submissions, please send an abstract (200-250 words) and short bio (100 words) to Mauricio Oportus (mauricio.oportus@northwestern.edu) and Jesse Rothbard (jesse.rothbard@ucf.edu).