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,…

Los siguientes materiales son charlas y debates que tuvieron lugar en el marco de un taller co-organizado por el Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies y el Centro Latinoamericano de Zurich, el 2 y 3 de marzo de 2017 en la Universidad de Zurich, Suiza. Bajo el título algo provocativo de “Critica Cultural y el Giro Fascista”, el taller invitó a cuatro renombrados críticos culturales de Argentina, Brasil, y Paraguay a reflexionar sobre los recientes cambios en el panorama político de estos países, y sobre las maneras en que estos cambios contrastan con — o tal vez anticipen a — tendencias político-culturales y debates críticos a nivel regional y global.

The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies virtual conference January 12th, 11 am (EST) / 4 pm GMT / 8 am (PST): ‘The poetry-film nexus: intermediality and indiscipline in Latin American audiovisual cultures‘ February 8th, 12 pm (EST) / 5 pm (GMT) / 9 am (PST): ‘Human/nonhuman: decolonial perspectives on life on a diminished planet’ March 12th, 12 pm (EST) / 5 pm (GMT) / 9 am (PST): ‘Eroticized bodies and politicized desires’. To register for the Q&A sessions, please click here. How can we think together about the work of cultural studies in times of pandemic? Has Covid-19 upended…

Abstract Deadline: December 15, 2020 Co-edited by Javier Fernández-Galeano (Wesleyan University) and Zeb Tortorici (NYU) The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies seeks contributors for a special issue on the topic of “Obscenity, Censorship, and Libidinal Politics in Latin America.” We are particularly interested in exploring interdisciplinary approaches to better understand the shifting political, cultural, and technical contours of what gets defined as “obscene,” and how censorship works in relation to state politics, aesthetics, and forms of activism. In recent years, with the explosive growth of the field of Porn Studies, there has been a rise in scholarship on the…

(This is the second dispatch in our series COVID-19 in Latin America: Dispatches from the Southern Frontlines)   Abstract The emerging SARS-CoV-2, a novel human coronavirus, caused the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 9.5 million cases and 484 000 known fatalities to date (June 24th, 2020). In several regions, healthcare systems have collapsed whereas interventions applied to slow the viral spreading have had major social and economic impacts. After China, Europe, and the United States, Latin America has emerged as the new epicenter of the pandemic. By late-June, the region accounted for roughly 50% of global daily deaths (Gardner, 2020)….