MLA 2020 Special Session
Sponsored by MLA’s LLC Latina and Latino (G100) Forum
Executive Committee Members
John Alba Cutler, Jan. 2020
Ariana Vigil, Jan. 2021 (2019–Jan. 2020 Ch.)
Carmen Lamas, Jan. 2022 (2019–Jan. 2020 Sec.)
Elena Machado Sáez, Jan. 2023
Marion Christina Rohrleitner, Jan. 2024
Date and Location: Friday, January 10; 1:45 p.m.; Convention Center Room 604.
Organizer and Presider: Elena Machado Sáez, Professor of English, Bucknell University
Panel Description: “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.
While US Latinx Studies as a discipline has often viewed the workings of US capitalism with a critical or skeptical eye, literary criticism on US Latinx creative writing has tended to view contemporary texts through the lens of identity politics and US multiculturalism while limiting analyses of social critique to Sixties Era production. This panel strives to connect these divergent approaches by being attentive to both resident and immigrant Latinx subjects (a distinction coined by Juan Flores) and how different experiences of disaster capitalism might intersect. What publics and counter-publics are shared by the refugee and the inner-city dweller? How might US political and economic imperialism in the “Third World” form an important context for rereading race relations and the immigration crisis in the United States? How are forms of political action and advocacy being reimagined?
Together, these presentations speak to the MLA’s Presidential Theme of “Being Human” by drawing attention to the way US Latinx cultural production “bear[s] witness” to “threats to the rights of human beings.” The panel also draws parallels between literary responses to “forms of suffering” and other types of creative expression. This panel focuses on various forms of contemporary cultural production (literature, photography, social media, sports) and pushes the critical discussion of class and race to consider transnational implications. The landscape of the presentations includes US urban centers like Los Angeles, New York, and Miami, as well as Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Venezuela.
In sum, the panel offers a nuanced perspective on US Latinx creativity and, in so doing, makes an important intervention into contentious public debates over the belonging of US Latinx people and their legibility as subjects with rights.
Presentations and Panelists:
- “The blackouts of a tiny country”: When U.S. Interventionism in Central America Comes Home
- Cristina Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of English, Providence College
- Abstract: Throughout the 20th century, the U.S. maintains the unhallowed distinction of being on the undemocratic side of most political conflicts in Latin America. In the 21st century the refugees of these wars begin streaming in, with immigration from Central America to the U.S. growing faster than any other population group. Contemporary Latinx authors of Central American descent are bringing these Central American wars, in El Salvador (William’s Archila’s The Art of Exile (2009), in Nicaragua (Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman (1998), and in Guatemala (Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier (1998), onto the page and into the U.S. spaces of Los Angeles and New York City through narrative. This Latinx cultural production demonstrates the interconnectedness of the hemisphere, portrays the complex and lasting effects of transnationalism tempered by trauma, and most importantly, requires the U.S. to acknowledge its own role in its current immigration “crisis.”
- “The Devil’s Recipe”: Apocalyptic Destruction in Hemispheric Venezuelan Imaginaries
- Maia Gil’Adí, Assistant Professor of English, University of Massachusetts at Lowell
- Abstract: This paper traces the scenes and sites of Venezuelan protest in a transnational context. I uncover how Venezuelan protest spaces such as the highway, the barrio, and the book highlight violence, destruction, and the unfinished as ultimate sites of pleasure. Through literary analysis, visual, and cultural analysis, my paper investigates the mobilization of the “otherworldly” and “cataclysmic” to understand how Venezuelan subjects in Miami, Caracas, and beyond incite radical political identities of refusal. This project resituates Venezuela in Latinx literary and cultural studies, attending to Latinx and Latin American aesthetics, especially in their association with American imperialism and capitalism. Examining the tradition of apocalyptic demonstrations against government power into the post-Chavez present, my paper expands common conceptions of Latinx literary and cultural studies and latinidad through its attention to manifestations of disturbance, destruction, and the unfinished. Exploring Alberto Barrera Tyska’z novel, La enfermedad (The Sickness), the photography of Alexander Apóstol’s “Skeleton Coast” series, and the dissemination of video of the 2017 anti-government protests in global media outlets, social media, and messaging systems such as whatsapp, my paper demonstrates how these cataclysmic sites cohere oppositional publics in Venezuela, the U.S., and throughout the American hemisphere.
- Governances of the Dead: Daniel José Older’s Salsa Nocturna and a Necropolitics from Below
- Kristy L. Ulibarri, Assistant Professor of English, University of Denver
- Abstract: This paper will read how Daniel José Older’s speculative fiction collection Salsa Nocturna complicates Achille Mbembe’s idea that Third World, mobile, racialized subjects are rendered into “living dead” status by a political economy that deploys “the creation of deathworlds, new and unique forms of social existence.” In Older’s collection, the Council of the Dead rules over the spirit world of New York City, and the stories parody contemporary forms of governance over subjects who do not “fit”: peoples who are subject to some nation-state laws but are outside of “citizen” rights. Drawing on the work of Lisa Marie Cacho and the criminalization of migrant and Latinx subjects in the US, this paper argues that Older’s stories in Salsa Nocturna question the way “living dead” subjectivities are disempowered and imagine ways that they are powerful. [Footnote: Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 12.]