Interrogating the Circulation of Data, Images and Narratives in Latin America

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel brings together scholars using circulation as a framework to study literary and cultural production in Latin America from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including history, literary studies, cultural studies, and digital culture studies. We seek to embrace the methodological opportunities of this “emergent threshold concept” (Gries 2018) as well as address the challenges of engaging with objects of study which are in movement and materials which are displaced across multiple sites. Papers in the panel will cover different objects of study – literary works, manuscripts, ideas, advertising, and quantitative data – in different geographical and temporal contexts (ranging from the US and Mexico to Chile and Brazil, and from the late nineteenth century through to the present day), drawing out commonalities and divergences. We ask how far the concept of circulation works differently for different objects of study and what conclusions is it possible to draw about the ‘impact’ of data, images, and narratives from studying their circulation. Echoing Laurie Gries’s characterisation of “circulation studies” in the introduction to the recent edited volume Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric, the panel explores “how bodies, artifacts, words, pictures, and other things flow within and across cultures to affect meaningful change”. It aims to employ circulation as a way of interrogating everyday realities of inclusion, exclusion and power as they relate to and manifest themselves in discourses of national identity, cultural heritage, race, modernity, and security.

Sub Track

• Literature and Culture: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Session Organizer

• Tori Holmes, Queen's University Belfast

Chair

• Joanna E Crow, University of Bristol

Individual Presentations

• Tracing Discomfort: Using Archives and Digital Tools to Reveal Exclusion - Allison B Ramay, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

• "An Unexpected Influence": Photostats, Libraries, and the Circulation of Documentary Heritage - Hannah Alpert-Abrams, Brown University

• José Vasconcelos, the Making of Race, and Circuits of Knowledge in Early Twentieth Century Latin America - Joanna E Crow, University of Bristol

• Advertising Mexico - Claire R Lindsay, University College London

• Circulation in Public Security Data Activism in Rio de Janeiro - Tori Holmes, Queen's University Belfast