This conversation between member of the editorial board Amanda Smith (University of California Santa Cruz) and guest-editor Patrícia Vieira (University of Coimbra) expands on the critical and conceptual coordinates framing the newly published special issue “The Amazon River Basin: Extractivism, Aesthetics, and Indigenous Perspectives” (32.3).
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BlogJean Franco, who passed away in December 2022 at the age of 98, was a founding figure of Latin American cultural studies –particularly but not exclusively in English-speaking academia– and one of the Journal’s most important interlocutors since its own inception in 1992. In fact, the Journal’s second issue of that same year, focused in its entirety on the concept of border, featured an essay-length review by Jean (included in this collection), in which she discusses the implications, methodologically and conceptually speaking, of Néstor García Canclini’s landmark book Culturas híbridas, published in Mexico only two years earlier, for the project of cultural studies as it was taking shape in the Anglosphere at the time. In what even now remains an impressively prescient and provocative reading, her analysis of Canclini zeroes in on his “tour” of Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology and the way the latter’s construction of a “national heritage” effectively patrols the border –hence the essay’s title– between authenticity and kitsch, ancestrality and comodity, which Canclini’s notion of hybridity would challenge and complicate, Jean argued, in ways both similar and complementary to those in which scholars such as Susan Stewart and Mieke Bal were then rethinking objectness, space and scale in the museum, or those in which Donna Haraway was starting to rethink race, gender, and species barriers. It was this exceptional capacity for thinking outside the box (in particular, the one engineered by academic disciplines and their various forms of border patrolling) that set Jean Franco’s work apart for over half a century – first, by almost single-handedly re-inventing the peninsular-centered field of “Hispanic Studies” through her ground breaking trilogy The Modern Culture of Latin America (1967), An Introduction to Latin American Literature (1969), and Spanish American Literature Since Independence (1973). Following appointments at the Universities of London and Essex (where she held the first chair for Latin American literature in the UK), upon moving to Stanford in 1972 and eventually to Columbia University in 1982, and upon completing an authoritative monograph on the poetry of César Vallejo (1976), Jean became once again a leading voice in the field’s cultural turn, one that her own much broader interest and involvement with anti-imperialism, the women’s movement and the struggle against the wave of rightwing dictatorships rolling through the region (which she had experienced firsthand in the 1954, CIA-engineered coup against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala) had long anticipated. Her work on the emplotments of gender in literary representations, popular culture, and architecture (Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico, 1989), and on the Latin American Cold War and the reconfigurations of the cultural field it ushered in (The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City, 2002; Cruel Modernity, 2013) were, once again, field-defining in both method and scope. This collection features an overview of Jean’s contribution to the project of Latin American cultural studies since the 1990s, the many legacies of which remain at the heart of critical endeavors today.
The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies proudly announces the dossier “Affective Arrangements and Violence in Latin America,” edited by Silvana Mandolessi, Reindert Dhondt, and Martín Zícari, which has just been published in Vol, 31, Issue 3. The five articles compiled in this dossier explore how social practices and aesthetic objects in Latin America mobilise affective dispositions and politics. The articles investigate a multiplicity of bodies, which are both individual and social, human and non-human, natural and cultural, textual and visual, shaping as well as deconstructing the surface of the Latin American territory. Affects mobilise – and are mobilised – in multiple ways and through multiple media, but all the articles share the common intent to examine the mobilisation of affects as relational, social, and situated dynamics, interrogating the particular situatedness of Latin America.
Here are some further readings on questions of affect, media, and the politics and cultures of violence published in the Journal in recent years:
Cynthia Francica, “A Dystopian Utopia: Queerness, Affect and the Political in Roberto Jacoby’s Darkroom (2002)” Vol. 28, 2 (2019): 291-320.
Cecilia Macón, “Time-Riding: Albertina Carri and the Ironic Affective Presence of the Past” Vol. 27, 3 (2018): 399-414.
Brad Epps, “The Unbearable Lightness of Bones: Memory, Emotion, and Pedagogy in Patricio Guzmán’s Chile, la memoria obstinada and Nostalgia de la luz” Vol. 26, 4 (2017): 483-502.
Kaitlyn M. Murphy, “Memory Mapping: Affect, Place, and Testimony in El Lugar Más Pequeño (2011)” Vol. 25, 4 (2016): 571-595.
Irene Depetris Chauvin, “Geographies of Love(lessness), Space and Affectivity in Viajo Porque Preciso, Volto Porque te Amo (Karim Aïnouz and Marcelo Gomes, 2009) and Turistas (Alicia Scherson, 2009)” Vol. 25, 3 (2016): 467-483.
Martín Fotta, Sílvia Posocco and Frank Dylan Smith, “Violence and Affective States in Contemporary Latin America” Vol. 25, 2 (2016): 167-177.
Andrew Lantz, “The Performativity of Violence: Abducting Agency in Mexico’s Drug War” Vol. 25, 2 (2016): 252-269.
Frank Dylan Smith, “Feeling the Boundaries of Normality – ‘tristeza’ and the Restitution of Community in the Aftermath of Violence” Vol. 25, 2 (2016): 237-251.
Andrea Noble, “Introduction: Visual Culture and Violence in Contemporary Mexico” Vol. 24, 4 (2015): 417-433.
Sarah Wright, “Noli me tangere: Memory, embodiment and affect in Silvio Caiozzi’s Fernando ha vuelto (2005)” Vol. 21, 1 (2012): 37-48.
Luis Duno Gottberg, “Mob Outrages: Reflections on the Media Construction of the Masses in Venezuela (April 200-January 2003)” Vol. 13, 1 (2004): 115-135.
Rachel Price, member of the editorial board of JLACS; the magazine’s executive editor, Isis Sadek; the guest editor of the dossier “Material Turn in Cuban Studies”, María A. Cabrera Arús; and two of the authors, Jacqueline Loss and Michael Bustamante, discussed the highlights of this special issue on Cuban material culture (Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies vol. 30, no. 2). What are the implications of the recent shift towards material culture in Cuban studies? Could material culture studies help fill some of the analytical gaps produced by the lack of access to some archives? The debate revolved around the…
National Strike in Colombia (April 28th to…) Translated by Conor Harris. The morning of Wednesday, April 28th did not bode well for a massive protest in Colombia. The country was at the peak of a third wave of COVID 19 infections, and its hospitals were under a red alert due to the high occupancy rates of Intensive Care Units. The national government, as well as many regional and local governments, had issued a stay-at-home order to avoid infections due to large-scale, open-air gatherings. Moreover, some regional and local governments issued mandatory curfews, prohibitions on the sale of alcohol, and obligatory…
Join us for a conversation between editors Gabriel Gatti and David Casado-Neira, and authors Pamela Colombo and Jens Andermann, on the new ramifications of the concept of disappearance in global landscapes marked by the precarization of the living, migrations of uprooted communities, and the rapid advance of extractive frontiers in the Global South. How have the debates of the Latin American postdictatorship responded to current challenges to human rights, memory, and justice, and which are the new meanings these circumstances reveal to have always already been latent in the imaginary of disappearance?
How can we think together about the work of cultural studies in times of pandemic? Has Covid-19 upended our research agendas, or has it transformed the ways in which we think about culture, coloniality, empire, mediality, race, queerness, and aesthetics? For more than two decades, the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies conferences have showcased new work in the field, first in the form of annual one-day events at Birkbeck College, London, and more recently as multi-day events hosted, among others, by the University of Texas, Austin, UNAM (Ciudad de México), the University of Zurich and Oxford University. This year’s…
March 12th, 12 pm (EST) / 5 pm (GMT) / 9 am (PST) To register for the Q&A session, please click here. In recent years, there has been a significant expansion of studies around (post)pornograpy, experiences and activisms around sexual and gendered dissidence, and the intimacy and eroticization of mechanisms and representations of (postcolonial) power. In this vein, our panel seeks to rethink the obscene and its attendant libidinal politics as a conceptual space that activates the tensions between repulsion and seduction, pleasure and violence, the private and the public, and art and archiving. Some of the topics that…
February 8th, 2021, 12 pm (EST) / 5 pm (GMT) / 9 am (PST) (ZOOM) To register for the Q&A session, please click here. This panel, part of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies online symposium series Pandemonio 2021, asks about the challenges the contemporary crisis of the living unleashed by anthropogenic climate change, planetary metabolic rift and the ever-accelerating rate of species extinctions presents to the field of cultural studies and to the humanities more widely. What do the vocabularies and frameworks of disciplines predicated on the distinctiveness and autonomy of aesthetic experience, and thus also of…
January 12th, 2021, 11am (EST) / 4 pm (GMT) / 8 am (PST) (ZOOM – Youtube) To register for the Q&A session, please click here. Intermediality and “indisciplined” art have been at the forefront of a number of important recent works of Latin American Cultural Studies, which have raised questions about the viability of generic divisions (e.g. Aguilar; Garramuño; Nagib). In our current edited book project we explore what we call the “poetry-film nexus” in Latin America, considering the diverse modes of intermedial exchange between verse and screen, with contributions ranging from early cinema to present-day audiovisual media. We consider,…