Alejandro Lopez (Boston University)

Canonical maps of literature have traditionally been built around political borders, not cultural ones, and the so-called Latin American canon is no exception. The result is a cartography that mistakes the nation-state for the unit of literary meaning and the market for the arbiter of literary value. Within this cartography, certain texts — and the cosmovision they carry — have been repeatedly misclassified, marginalized, or amputated in criticism and translation. And yet they return. Not as nostalgic reveries or ethnographic curiosities, but as living epistemological forces that the canonical machine has proven structurally incapable of absorbing.

This panel proposes that the untameability of these texts is not accidental but constitutive. Indigenous cosmogonies and their myths do not fit the arboreal logic of literary taxonomy because they were never organized around that logic. The lobizón is exemplary: it has frequently been wrongly associated with werewolf mythology, but the belief is rooted in pre-existing Indigenous and gaucho cosmovisions, transforming in the encounter. An arboreal taxonomy cannot accommodate these cosmogonical grafts because they operate rhizomatically — through connection, heterogeneity, and rupture — and their literary manifestations resist the classificatory violence that the twentieth-century canon, amplified by Cold War translation apparatuses and market forces, repeatedly exercised upon them.

We welcome papers that follow these texts across national traditions, linguistic borders, and disciplinary frameworks. Papers may engage specific figures, oral traditions, or authors; examine the market, publishing, and institutional forces that determine which cosmovisions enter the canon and in what condition; or propose alternative cartographies organized around region, ecology, or Indigenous epistemology rather than the nation-state.

This panel explores how traditional literary canons tied to national borders and shaped by market forces marginalize Indigenous and alternative worldviews that resist rigid classification. Tracing boundary-crossing texts invites participants to dismantle nation-state frameworks and propose new literary cartographies rooted in regional, ecological, and Indigenous epistemologies.