I am presiding over the “Latinx Aftershocks” panel at the 2020 MLA convention in Seattle! This panel is sponsored by MLA’s LLC Latina and Latino (G100) Forum.
Check out the complete panel abstract, presenters, and presentation abstracts here:
https://elenamachado.blogs.bucknell.edu/latinx-aftershocks-mla-2020
Panel Abstract: “Latinx Aftershocks” explores how US Latinx cultural production responds to states of emergency, human rights crises, and disaster capitalism. The panel highlights the dialogue between US Latinx populations and their communities of origin to process the reverberations of such crises. Taking its inspiration from Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007), the panel considers how the condition of being “disaster-shocked” not only refers to collective devastation by hurricanes or war, but also to neoliberal terms of recovery that require exploitation and dehumanization. The presenters situate their research at the fault lines of disaster capitalism, interrogating who is considered human and how the rights of the citizen are delimited.