Unmooring Latinidad: On Christina A. León's Matters of Inscription: Reading Figures of Latinidad

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

Centering Christina A. León's groundbreaking *Matters of Inscription: Reading Figures of Latinidad,* participants in this roundtable and the author consider the contributions of this text towards a rethinking of difference, belonging, and oppositional politics and knowledge practices in late US-empire. While challenging the troubling tendency to collapse disparate histories, geopolitics, race and class as well as immigration experiences of various groups within terms such as "Latina/o," "Latin@" or "Latinx," León's text questions the supposed transparency of the pan-ethnic term's political performativity. Through detailed engagements and readings of the practices of artists generally identified as "Latinx," Matters of Inscription challenges audiences to reevaluate the construction and staging of identities in tense relationship with ontological stability, and the reproduction of dispossession and marginalization effected through taxonomic terms or the assumed correspondence between individual life and artistic practice. A welcome challenge in queer, feminist, ethnic and racial studies, León's text puts pressures on the facile identitarian presumptions that shape institutions, research, and artistic agendas of cultural producers invested in more than what Latinx can do. Panelists from different fields will highlight the contributions of the text to to American Studies more generally, offering questions and insights on the relevance of León's intervention to broader discussions of identity and belonging in late US-empire.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Panelists

• Carlos U Decena, Rutgers University

• Ronald Mendoza-de Jesus, Emory University

• Judith Rodríguez, Indiana University-Bloomington

• Erin Graff Zivin, University of Southern California

Comment

• Christina León, Duke University

Biographical Information

Carlos Ulises Decena is an interdisciplinary scholar, whose interests include critical theory as well as social and cultural analysis, with a particular emphasis on transnationalism and diaspora in the American continent, US Latinoamerica and the Caribbean. His first book, Tacit Subjects: Belonging and Same-Sex Desire among Dominican Immigrant Men, was published by Duke University Press in 2011. His book, Circuits of the Sacred: Faggotology in the Black Latinx Caribbean, articulates Latin@, queer, and Afro-diasporic spiritologies in the service of a non-denominational, sex and body-affirmative notion of the divine for queers of color. The book was published in 2023 by Duke University Press. The author of several single and co-authored articles published in peer-reviewed publications in the United States and in the Américas, Decena serves as Professor of Latino and Caribbean Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. He is also Director, Office of Undergraduate Intellectual
Life, at the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice

Erin Graff Zivin is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California, where she is Director of the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab. She is the author of three books—Anarchaeologies: Reading as Misreading (Fordham UP, 2020), Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic (Northwestern UP, 2014; winner of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association Best Book Prize), and The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary (Duke UP, 2008). In addition to her books, Graff Zivin has published 45 articles and edited five volumes and dossiers on Latin American and comparative literature and media, philosophy, and critical theory. Last fall, she curated an exhibition at the USC Fisher Museum of Art on the work of Narcisa Hirsch, pioneer of Argentinian experimental film. Graff Zivin is currently overseeing the digitization of Hirsch’s entire filmic work, and completing her fourth book, Transmedial Exposure: The Ethics and Politics of Formal Experimentation, which asks what happens when a work of art from one artistic medium is exposed to, adapted, translated, or distorted by a work from a different medium.

Christina A. León is Assistant Professor of Literature at Duke University. She specializes in literary, anticolonial, critical race, feminist, and queer theories, with a concentration on Latinx and Caribbean literature, art, and thought. Her scholarly writing focuses on the interplay of materiality and semiosis to better theorize and attend to works by authors and artists who often become known only through their identificatory markers, overdetermined by grammars of race and gender. She is the author of Matters of Inscription: Reading Figures of Latinidad (NYU Press 2024). Her articles and essays have been published in Women and Performance, ASAP/Journal, Diacritics, GLQ, Sargasso, Small Axe, Representations, and Post-45. She serves as the co-editor of the Gender Theory book series at SUNY Press.

Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús is Acting Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Emory University. His first book, Catastrophic Historicism: Reading Julia de Burgos Dangerously (Fordham University Press, 2023), lays the theoretical groundwork for a non-historicist concept of literary history through an examination of the place of Julia de Burgos—the most canonical of Puerto Rico’s national poets—within the constellation of Puerto Rican modernity. He’s currently working on three book projects: Unworldly Islands: Non-Sovereign Poetics and Caribbean Life reconstructs an Antillean political imaginary that reckons with the failures of the project of post-colonial sovereignty in the region, foregrounding the work of Caribbean thinkers who imagine the Antilles as a political space no longer ruled by the desire for sovereignty. Another Bio-politics: Deconstructing Life for Democracy’s Survival, develops the concept of life implicit in Derrida’s deconstructive engagement with the history of metaphysics, political philosophy, and contemporary biology to make the case that the survival of democracy demands that we rethink life itself in democratic terms. The Image of History: Walter Benjamin and the Future of Historical Phenomenology provides not only the first systematic philosophical account of Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image but also the first historical reconstruction of Benjamin’s critical engagement with Heidegger’s approach to historical phenomenology. His essays on continental philosophy, deconstruction, and Caribbean studies have appeared in Qui Parle, Small Axe, CENTRO Journal, Diacritics, Discourse, Mosaic, the New Centennial Review, the Oxford Literary Review, and other journals.

Judith Rodríguez is an Assistant Professor of Afro-Latinx Studies in the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department with a joint appointment in the Latino Studies Program. Judith specializes in trans-disciplinary approaches to Black critical theory, Afro-Latinx Studies, and Caribbean philosophical thought. Specifically, her work draws together research in Puerto Rican aesthetics and performance studies with Black studies and Black feminist theory, Afro-Caribbean Philosophy, and gender and sexuality studies. Her manuscript, titled Africana Profunda: The Aesthetic Blackening of Puerto Rico and its Diaspora, explores works of literature, music, documentary film, and theatre and performance since the 1930s that have critiqued—and imagined alternatives to—the antiblack violence produced through the various cultural and historical discourses of racial hybridity on the island and its diaspora. Her second book-length project, titled Outlaw Performances: Reading Black Dissonance in Puerto Rican Legal Discourse, explores the performance of Blackness and race within juridical interpretations of domestic violence law in Puerto Rico. This project follows the theories and methods of Africana Profunda from the aesthetic to the juridical realm to investigate the legal grammar of Puerto Rican domestic violence law and foregrounds the highly racialized language that drives the law’s court decisions. Judith was an invited participant in the University of California Humanities Research Institute Residential Research Group Queer Hemisphere/América Queer. She was a visiting scholar in the Literature Section at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 2018-2019 and received her PhD in Culture and Theory at UC Irvine in 2019. She has published work in Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies and has a forthcoming chapter in the anthology Punk: Las Américas through Duke University Press.