Thinking with Blackness: Languages, Aesthetics, and Theories of Afro-Latin Americanism

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel explores humanistic approaches to blackness across hemispheric Latin America. Working through the lens of aesthetics, ethics, and politics, papers will explore the critical processes and representations of blackness and black bodies within Latin America in relation to broader debates on critical race studies and literature. Accordingly, this panel addresses the relationship between blackness and the human, complementary and divergent approaches to hemispheric black scholarship, and the tensions emerging from current debates in black studies as they manifest themselves in a Latin American context. The papers in this panel raise questions about the critical vocabulary attached to “race,” “culture,” and “body,” to ask: How do we study blackness in the humanities? How does language begin to theorize Afro-Latin Americanism? In line with the goals of LASA2019, this panel approaches these topics through an inclusionary lens to bring blackness into conversation with ideas about what constitutes “América,” by locating these themes within both colonial and postcolonial contexts, Mexico, Colombia, and the Caribbean.

Sub Track

• Literature and Culture: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Session Organizer

• Vincent D. Cervantes, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Chair

• Vincent D. Cervantes, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Individual Presentations

• Un escenario para la nación: Delia Zapata Olivella como “intelectual vernácula” - Juan A Suarez, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

• Accreted Sediments; Amalgamated Paths: The grammar of “transmigration” in Yolanda Arroyo Pizzaro’s “changó” - Adrian Emmanuel Hernandez-Acosta, Harvard University

• 'They’re Chatterboxes with their Feet’: Black Dances, Speech Impediments, Black Disability in the Early Ibero-Atlantic - Nicholas Jones

• Shameful Skin - Vincent D. Cervantes, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign