Optimisms of the Will: Central America Beyond the Image of Crisis

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

While, in a tropicalist sense, we often imagine Central America as a site of vibrant jungles, diverse wildlife, in short, an excellent site ecotourism, today, naming the region resonates more with the catch-all Trumpian expression of early 2018: as a place of small “shithole countries” whose people need to “go back to their huts.” This blanketing rhetoric has made the labor of Central American Studies a project on the defensive, one that often speaks back to oppositional rhetoric through the critical approach of historicizing, by spotlighting the origins of present-day inequalities. A sizable portion of recent literature of the region reckons with this concrete fact, inadvertently orienting Central American Studies towards case studies of pessimism, hopelessness, and interminable ruin. This panel asks: Is there room for optimism in today’s Central American Studies characterized by an enduring historical moment of crisis? How might an emergent Central American Studies theorize the life of pessimism residing in its scholarship? What narrative strategies or what détournements might be possible, for us as scholars and practitioners, to chart new horizons for Central American Studies?

Sub Track

• Culture, Power, and Political Subjectivities

Session Organizer

• Jorge E Cuéllar, Dartmouth College

Chair

• Arely M Zimmerman, Pomona College

Individual Presentations

• Finding Ourselves in the Archive: Eighteenth-Century Maps of El Salvador - Carlos A Rivas, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

• Revisiting Llort: Salvadoran Costumbrismo and the Influence of "0La Semilla de Dios" - Mauricio E Ramirez, University of California Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz)

• Out of Necessity: The Conceptual Potential of Central American Studies - Jorge E Cuéllar, Dartmouth College