Inclusion, Justice, History

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

The Call for Papers for the 2019 LASA Conference in Boston invokes José Martí’s 1891 essay “Nuestra América” for its response to the institutional discourses on regional cooperation of the day (the 1889-90 Pan-American Conference in Washington, DC) and proposes to extend Martí’s message today in order to “promote a hemispheric vision of justice and inclusion in an era when global politics is too often built around walls and securing borders” instead of attending to pressing problems of social inequality, exclusion, and coercion. This panel questions to what extent the message in Martí’s essay offers a clear alternative to forms of violence associated with the erection of walled borders today. The cultural politics of criollismo that inheres in Martí’s account of what unites “Nuestra América” can be understood as a mode of legitimating hegemonic dominance within societies characterized by ethnic heterogeneity and vast economic inequalities. We propose that the matters of inclusion and justice call for a far-reaching interrogation of the Latin American archives of thought and cultural production that does not content itself with identitarian claims to difference. In particular, we are interested in scholarly and critical work that take up the questions of justice and/or inclusion in relation to history. That is to say, the past and its bearing on contemporary struggles, but also how the singularity of what happens in the world is understood, for instance through narrative processes or through the dialectical work of conceptualization.

Sub Track

• Culture, Power, and Political Subjectivities

Session Organizer

• Patrick E Dove, Indiana University

Chair

• Kate Jenckes, University of Michigan

Individual Presentations

• Kynicism and Consciousness in Horacio Castellanos Moya - Veronica Brownstone, University of Pennsylvania

• The Literary Will Not Be Justified - Brett S Levinson, State University of New York/Binghamton

• Inclusion, Incision, Imbunche: Catalina Parra’s Collages and the Question of Justice - Kate Jenckes, University of Michigan

• Polemos and History, Narrative and Image in Sergio Ramírez’s "Mil y una muertes" - Patrick E Dove, Indiana University