Fictions of Circulation & the Circulation of Fictions in Latin America - NeMLA Convention March 17-20, 2016

full name / name of organization: 
Lorena Cuya Gavilano / Lycoming College
contact email: 

People, narratives, and genres move across geographic, linguistic, temporal, and cultural boundaries. Their multiple modes of circulation generate conceptual and rhetorical strategies to preserve, adapt, transform, and/or conceal identity vis-à-vis issues of spatial and temporal mobility. In the last hundred years, the circulation of people, texts, and other cultural productions among Latin American countries has proved to be increasingly rich and complex in positive and negative ways. This roundtable* focuses on works that deal with the circulation of people and narratives across Latin American borders. It focuses on texts that are, in essence, privileged manifestations of transnational, post-national, and/or World Literature phenomena and explores: How do they fictionalize the concept of circulation or mobility, and what are the fictions of circulation?

Over the last two decades, scholars like Mary Louis Pratt, Walter Mignolo, Franco Moretti, and Pascale Casanova have focused on the function of displacement, transmission, and reception of people and texts mostly as a unidirectional movement privileging the center in detriment to the peripheries. This roundtable, however, challenges such an assumption and seeks papers that explore self-conscious or metanarrative depictions of the processes of circulation of people and/or narratives throughout Latin America, especially South America. This roundtable will discuss how South American narratives challenge the unidirectionality of such circulations. What if the peripheries function as cultural hubs? How does the literary imagination challenge the idea of the periphery as the place of stagnation and the center as a place of movement? What are the fictions of circulations represented by these texts? How are they rhetorically or aesthetically represented? How does mobility challenge the literary imagination, and how is mobility challenged by the literary imagination?

Abstract Submission Deadline: September 30th, 2015

Please send a 300 words abstract. Please notice that the title should have 100 characters (including spaces).
and 300 words for the abstract.

Link for submissions: http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/participate/submit.html

Acceptance/rejection letters will be sent by October 15th, 2015.

*Roundtable: participants give brief, informal presentations (5-10 minutes) and the session is open to conversation and debate between participants and the audience.