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,…

(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)….

Image: Aldeia Guarani/Kaiowá, Dourados (Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil). Photo: Maximino Rodrigues   (This is the first dispatch in our series COVID-19 in Latin America: Dispatches from the Southern Frontlines.) Translated by Jens Andermann Dear readers, and everyone interested in this situation, which frightens all people of this earth, the water planet. We live amidst so many diversities that today we get confused even about the kind of people we are, even though we are the first inhabitants of this land called tekoha guasú (the great land). At this difficult time, our Indigenous people here at the village where we…

DOSSIER: COVID-19 in Latin America: Dispatches from the Southern Frontlines Introduction The outbreak of coronavirus with early epicenters in Eastern Asia, Europe, and the United States, has been followed more recently by increasingly alarming health emergencies across the Global South, with India, Southern and Central Africa reporting exponential surges of deaths and infections in May and June. But it is in Latin America where the pandemic is now threatening to explode into dimensions unseen even at the previous epicenters’ peak points, with Brazil now reporting the highest daily numbers of infections and deaths worldwide and other countries including Chile, Ecuador,…

Feminism, in all its multiplicity, is the most important social movement in Latin America now. After the region’s populist cycle, a turn to the most reactionary right-wing (either via the ballot box, as in Argentina and Chile, or via coups, as in Brazil, Paraguay and Honduras), has returned the continent to a stage of economic restoration, in the sense of a vertiginous accumulation of capital, perhaps the biggest since the nineteenth century, and one that runs parallel to former values related to the body, alongside former social privileges, with astonishing violence. The horrifying and escalating number of femicides and transfemicides…

Marking the foundation of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies in 1992, we have selected twenty-five stellar essays surveying the most influential themes and concepts, as well as scouring some of the polemics and controversies, which have marked the field over the last quarter of a century. The collection maps the fault lines of Latin American cultural studies over three decades, from the now classical discussions of the ‘cultural turn’ to more recent responses to the challenges of biopolitics, affect theory, posthegemony and ecocriticism. It also addresses novel political constellations including resurgent national-popular or eco-nativist and indigenous agencies. For…