Digital Encounters in Contemporary Latin American Cultural Production

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

The digital era is no longer new, yet we are experiencing an unprecedented level of connectivity through digital technologies. Rather than operating in isolation, twenty-first century Latin American writers, poets and bloggers navigate digital networks and narratives. As scholars of literary and cultural studies, we must now turn our attention to crowdsourced modes of production, discussion, and distribution. This panel evaluates the Latin American digital encounter as one of connection: to other users, to other works and streams of dialogue and media production, and to a broad and phenomenologically complex plane of the “digital” itself.
To understand this connectivity, we must first understand the digital space as a hubbub of voices and actions that collide along the lines of identity, experience, and desire. Implicit within all connections are questions of power and privilege: as such, our contributors critically examine issues of inequitable access, surveillance and data privacy, and the digital space as a site of exploitation and violence. In such contested spaces, connections form on the basis of shared experiences, identities, or languages. Our panelists describe how marginalized groups “broadcast” their daily realities into the digital space to impact public policy, women use hashtags to link their personal narratives to a pan-Latin American Twitter dialogue on sexual violence, and artists reflect on the glitches and failures wired into the Latin American internet infrastructure. Together, we examine the ways in which these digitally mediated contacts alter Latin American conceptions of self, Other, and world.

Sub Track

• Literature and Culture: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Session Organizer

• Cecily C Raynor, McGill University

Chair

• Nora C Benedict, Princeton University

Discussant

• Thea Pitman, University of Leeds

Individual Presentations

• Glitch in the Machine: Failure as Resistance in Latin American Digital Culture - Eduardo Ledesma, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• The Networked Search: Nation, Identity and Digital Literary Content in Chile and Argentina - Cecily C Raynor, McGill University

• PretaLab: Afro-Brazilian Women’s Digital Autonomy - Eduard A Arriaga, University of Indianapolis

• Syncretism of Latin American Death and Remembrance in the Postinternet - Norberto Gomez Jr., Montgomery College

• “Voy a ser cobarde ante ustedes”: The connective storytelling of #MiPrimerAcoso - Rhian E Lewis, McGill University