Whose América? Whose Latin? Interrupting Discourses of Citizenship and Belonging through Film, Performance and Mobile Culture

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

With settler colonialism having sustained over centuries the existence of a “Latin America”, the search for discourses oppressed under this history remains vexing, yet that much more necessary. Routes of cultural transfer promise critical insights into questioning the constitution of Latin America to include the ways in which colonialism’s capitalist and racist regimes have engendered emergent perceptions of aesthetic innovation and modernity. Using José Martí’s 1891 text as provocation, this roundtable session situates research on different forms of cultural production–music; dance; film–in terms of their negotiation of, and challenge to, Latin America as construct. In other words, how do the arts and expressive culture, in conversation with or emanating from such contesting worldviews, mould and mediate citizenry and discourses of belonging?

In particular, we would like to discuss: the significance of shifts produced in the constitution of (Latin) America through Indigenous migration to the US; the intensification of xenophobia and racism and how this infuses cultural production and its reception; and how diverse Black and Indigenous aesthetics productively interrupt the reproduction of Latin America as an inherently – and necessarily – Hispanic region. Different forms of mobile culture – Pixar’s animation film Coco; public music-dance performances in Mexico and Chile; and Ajuuk fiesta videos, all forms produced and consumed across certain types of borders – recycle and reimagine transnational visual, musical, aural, and narrative tropes to productively interrupt the standard categories for, and interpretations of, these artistic interventions.

Sub Track

• Film, Performance, and Culture

Session Organizers

• Charlotte E Gleghorn, University of Edinburgh

• David F Garcia, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Chairs

• Charlotte E Gleghorn, University of Edinburgh

• David F Garcia, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Discussant

• Lisa Maya Knauer, University of Massachusetts/Dartmouth

Presenters

• Jacqueline Avila

• Amanda M Black, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC)

• Ingrid Kummels, Freie Universitaet Berlin

• Juan Eduardo Wolf, University of Oregon