Program Tracks and Committee Members

Matthew Goodwin, University of New Mexico
Anita Huizar-Hernandez, Arizona State University 

This track concerns the concept of borderlands as developed by Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa in her groundbreaking book: “I think of the borderlands as Jorge Luis Borges’s Aleph, the one spot on earth that contains all other places within it. All people in it, whether natives or immigrants, colored or white, queers or heterosexuals, from this side of the border or del otro lado, are personas del lugar, local people—all of whom relate to the border and to the nepantla states in different ways.” Nepantla constitutes a symbolic state of being and a way of existence that embodies the in-betweenness that comes with inhabiting border spaces -geographical, cultural, sexual, or racial. This borderlands is a fertile space for inhabiting between tongues and cultures (vivir entre lenguas, as Sylvia Molloy proposed), but also a difficult, often traumatic and political territory where decolonial impulses coexist with colonial realities. This borderlands is both a place of resilience and invention, and of misunderstanding and violence. We invite papers and panels that address all dimensions of life in this space of being.

Michelle Clayton, Brown University
Néstor E. Rodríguez, University of Toronto
Cristina Soriano, University of Texas, Austin

In a reflection on her piece Caminhando, the making of a Moebius strip, Brazilian artist Lygia Clark highlights the way in which everything converges in an evanescent experience of the body in motion: “There is only one type of duration: the act. The act is that which produces the Caminhando. Nothing exists before and nothing afterwards.”  This track seeks reflections on the multiple dimensions of the moving body as a vehicle for an experience of and engagement with the world. Flows of groups of bodies across space and time-- migration, exile, diaspora, and errantry -- have been fundamental in shaping national and transnational politics, social movements, and cultural and ethnic identities in Latinx America. At the same time, embodied actions are vehicles for both activism and for affective experience: dance and performance, as well as the hand lost in the act of writing. What might we observe of bodies assembling in joy or grief? Of bodies coming together in various degrees of sociality? This track invites proposals for panels and papers that explore movement and circulation in Latinx América on individual, intimate, public, and collective scales. 

Ted Henken, Baruch College, City University of New York
Irina Troconis, Cornell University

In March 2020, the world was paralyzed. Some of our bodies became bites; our artistic and intellectual praxes were transferred to the World Wide Web. In the COVID-19 pandemic, we were witness to two opposing but complementary processes: the virtualization of daily life and the viralization of communication. The body, as operative system, was forced to confront both COVID-19’s viral load and the approach of a new virtual world, and to radically rethink physical interaction through social distancing. This track asks us to consider new ways of connecting, the metamorphoses and resignification of the body in the wake of the pandemic. It also proposes a living archaeology that can reclaim the complex discussion around media that has taken place in Latin America. We’re at the crossroads that critics like Jesús Martín Barbero have recognized as one of our region’s paradoxes: the simultaneous experience of an electronic late modernity and a culture where the body mediates everything. We’re particularly interested in new configurations of the body and its flexible inscription in social networks as well as in new conventions of the digital world, the culture of hate, polarized activisms, and artificial intelligence and its expanded access.

Lena Burgos Lafuente, Stony Brook University
Jacqueline Loss, University of Connecticut

In Latinx America there is an informal knowledge used for navigating daily life in its changeful, violent, unpredictable, and crisis-filled dimensions. Language describes this “street-smart” wisdom using terms like: bregar, resolver, dar um jeito, fazer uma gambiarra, negociar, remarla, chambear, atarlo con alambre, rebuscársela, to hustle. It can be understood as a neoliberalism from below, an entire unfolding of survival strategies that include informal economies, the interventions of social movements, and aesthetics as splendid as they are impoverished. In his discussion of the multiple scenarios of Puerto Rican life, Arcadio Díaz Quiñones tells us that someone who knows how to hustle, “manages something wisely and well, be that a world of things, a world of people or language itself.” This triple dimension touches the world, bodies, and language; the hustle is an erotic politics, precarious and pleasurable, that demands delicacy and maneuver. This track explores these forms of simultaneous negotiation and resistance – “tricks of the weak” as Josefina Ludmer called them – that imply collective imagination, affect and disobedience, but also calculation, intelligence, and ingenuity.

Roosbelinda Cárdenas, John Jay College, CUNY
Rafael Cesar, Princeton University

Intersectionality not only encompasses the intertwining of race, class, ethnicity, and gender, but also the dual, triple, or more ethnic, racial, and cultural backgrounds stemming from Latinx America. We encourage proposals that embrace an expansive idea of this concept, as articulated by transdisciplinary Latinx artist Martine Gutierrez in Indigenous Woman, 2018: “In working to convey my own fluid identity—an identity that brides the binaries of gender and ethnicity—I aim in part to subvert cis, white, Western standards of beauty and raise questions about inclusivity, appropriation, and consumerism.” This track will be a platform to discuss our shared and differentiated cultural pluralities and specificities; our past and current legacies and experiences of violence, social displacement, and oppression; and importantly, the intersection of our fluid cultural and gender identities, epistemologies, and political imagination.

Verónica Gago, Universidad Nacional de San Martín

This track​ addresses the current upsurge of transfeminist activism in the Global South and its unprecedented intersectional, cultural, social, and political engagement. These transfeminist movements are a tide woven of a new internationalism coming from the South and from below. They reinscribe and rethink traditional ideas of class, race, and gender and their biological assumptions. Women's social movements – fighting for fundamental rights such as security, education, and food – and feminist struggles for specific women’s rights – suffrage, divorce, abortion–, were previously divided. Now, in contrast, these movements are joined in common cause. In recent years, transfeminisms in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Peru, have fought as much for reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ claims, and against gender inequality, feminicide, and endemic violence towards women as for social rights that exceed the traditional feminist agenda. Ni Una Menos, The Green Tide movement, Justicia para Nuestras Hijas, Minervas, #EleNão, Nuestras hijas de regreso a casa, and LasTesis are examples of these protests, performances and mass mobilizations.

Santiago Acosta, Yale University
Valeria De los Ríos, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

The Amerindian worldview – according to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro – doesn’t differentiate between humans and animals, since myths “are full of beings whose forms, names, and behaviors inextricably combine human and non-human attributes in a shared context of intercommunication.” Today, new materialisms complicate the limits of the body, telling us that we are also the water we drink, the bacteria and viruses that we share. For this reason, we uphold the body as an assemblage of “vibrant matter” (à la Jane Bennett) that exceeds what we previously called the subject or the individual. The body is the site of a sensitivity that connects us to what is beyond the species, the living and, even, to what we sometimes call our surroundings or world. This track explores these openings in the body, highlighting its material dimension and its interventions in Anthropocene time, as we move towards other planetary temporalities. We’re interested in considering the condition of the human animal in relation to plants, other animals, and all those living beings that share their ways of knowing.