Residues of the Archive: on Belonging, Inequality, and Crisis from the IsthmUS

Session Submission Type: LASA Section Panel

Abstract

This panel considers the limits and potential of Latin American and Latinx cultural production that is self-consciously constructed from traumatic archival materials. In each instance, the works that we examine are composed as “second-order texts,” as they draw from the literary and historical archive as a means of interrogating (in)justice, exclusion, political crisis, and economic disparity in the present. The play on the word “IsthmUS” in our panel title recognizes the extensive relationship between Central America and the United States, which is reflected by the ways in which the literary texts we examine are concerned with politics, economic policies, activism, and immigration on a hemispheric scale. Collectively, this panel interrogates the ethical and political potential derived from the literary and aesthetic treatment of the archive, while also taking into account the limits and gaps of such approaches.

Sub Track

• Section Sessions

Session Organizer

• Tamara L Mitchell, Indiana University

Chair

• Tamara L Mitchell, Indiana University

Discussant

• Hector M Tobar

Individual Presentations

• Specters of Roque: The Pen and/as the Sword - Tamara L Mitchell, Indiana University

• Inhospitable Terrains of Migration: Mapping Survival on the Migrant Trail - Nike R Nivar Ortiz, University of Southern California

• Fictionalizing Testimony: Two Approaches in Postwar Guatemala - Lacey Schauwecker