Figure and Flesh: Human-Animal Entanglements in Latin America

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

For decades, Native and decolonial scholars have noted the importance of non-human life in discussions of settler colonialism, racial violence, Indigenous resistance, and more. And yet, although many of us have been concerned with the traces left by non-human others in our lives, we find ourselves often postponing our exploration of these traces. This year’s theme of justice and inclusion is a particularly apt one for considering the ways human/non-human entanglements can expand our thinking about culture and politics. What do we gain from exploring the invasions and evasions of animals in human worlds and the study of the tracks they leave? Following the tracks of animals often overlooked in archives, ethnographies, and cultural production, we ask how interdisciplinary questions about storytelling and representation, justice and violence, love and relation, are informed by the (sometimes violent) intimacies of human-animal encounters. The proposed panel examines various zones of encounter between human and non-human life and death in Latin America. Papers will explore the significance of animal slaughter and resistance in Argentine and Brazilian film and literature; the challenges of animal rights and justice movements in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico; the intersections of conservation and human-fish relations in the Dominican Republic, and the astounding historical, political, and ecological role cattle have played in the region. This panel explores how the production of social suffering for non-human animals may itself be one of the consequences of drawing a sharp divide between human and non-human life-worlds.

Sub Track

• Culture, Power, and Political Subjectivities

Session Organizers

• María Elena García, University of Washington

• Robin Lauren H Derby, University of California/Los Angeles

Chair

• María Elena García, University of Washington

Discussant

• Robin Lauren H Derby, University of California/Los Angeles

Individual Presentations

• Parrotfish: The Charisma of Conservation in the Caribbean - Kyrstin Mallon Andrews, University of California, Irvine (UC Irvine)

• Animals and Homesickness - Alexandra A Isfahani-Hammond, University of California/San Diego

• A Nation of Flesh: Argentine Slaughterhouses and Literary Imagination - Valeria Meiller

• “There’s No Crime without a Victim”: Justice, Animal Bodies, and Animal Rights in Ciudad Juárez, México - Ivan Sandoval-Cervantes, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

• Cattle are the most consequential Animal in Modern Latin America - Susanna B Hecht, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)