Spanish/Portuguese / Comparative Literature

Marco Ramirez (Lehman College)

From the first narratives of European colonizers arriving to the Latin American continent the question of where to locate Latin America in the geographical, mercantile, cultural and political maps has remained a central theme of our cultural and literary productions. This issue has also been at the heart of several political ventures, struggles for independence, processes of state formation, and networks of transatlantic and transpacific connections. While the question of “cosmopolitanism” became a prominent preoccupation in the late 19th century, in the mid-20th century the aesthetics and politics of the Latin American “Boom” became a global phenomenon that would drastically transform the presence of the Latin American letters around the globe. In the last decades, neoliberal globalization, changes in the process of late-industrialization –including the publishing field–, circulation of peoples and knowledges, and hyper-connectivity have come to dramatically modify the ways in which Latin American writers position themselves as participants in the cultural, political, economic and even ecologic cartographies. More recently, the event of the Covid-19 pandemic has given a new impulse to questions around global risks and planetary responsibility in our engagement with the world.

We invite scholars working on the aforementioned questions, as well as in the following topics:

- Global networks of circulation and literary markets

- Translation, literary prizes and cultural capital

- Eco-cosmopolitanism and transnational extractivism

- Disasters and pandemics as a planetary event

- Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chtulucene, and Post-human worlds

- Migrations, diasporas and global citizenship

- Global/(post)national indigeneities

- Globalization of Latin American literary genres

- Cosmopolitan desires/anxieties/fears/empathies

- Tensions between cosmopolitanism and provincialism

- Literary representation of global economic and political crises

- Dialogues between European and Latin American theories

- Theorization of/from/about Latin American literature

- South-South dialogues

- Latin America-Asia-Africa connections

This panel explores questions of world literature, cosmopolitanism, planetarity, and global networks of circulation in/about Latin America. The theoretical approaches include but are not limited to: eco-criticism, extractivism, anthropocene and the post-human, global indigeneities, migrations and post-national identities, and south-south dialogues.