What’s JLACS Travesías

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Travesías: Welcome to the Journal of Latin American Studies blog!

Travesías is our new, multi-language site for news, announcements, videos and podcasts and for free content from the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies . It is our latest addition to the journal’s presence on the internet, which also include our official print and online platform hosted by our publishers Taylor & Francis, where you can find our full list of issues as well as latest articles, instructions for authors and special issue/dossier editors, and information on the editorial board. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter for updates on news and events. Here at Travesías, as well as announce forthcoming events, publish calls for papers for special issues, and feature open-access articles, we will also be live-streaming talks, round-tables and conferences organized by the journal. In the Spanish and Portuguese section of the blog, you can also browse through original versions of contributions published in the Journal in English translation. We will also, finally, keep publishing short reflections on current affairs in Latin America and the Caribbean, including dispatches and interviews, ahead of their ‘official’ print and online publication in the Journal.

The first issue of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies came out in 1992, the year of the Quinto Centenario. Its typesetting, distribution and illustrations, painstakingly hand-pasted onto the pages, echoed the experimental and even somewhat conspiratorial nature of the journal’s founding conversations. A handful of academics, linked in one way or another to the Centre of Latin American Cultural Studies that William Rowe had established at King’s College, London in 1989, were busy trafficking some of the new vocabularies of cultural critique emerging all across Latin America back into the homeland of Cultural Studies and into syllabi of Hispanic and Portuguese Studies departments in the UK. The journal, circulating under the name of Travesía during its first years, was soon assimilated into a knowledge economy in which ‘Cultural Studies’ increasingly became an exchange currency between critical work produced in various parts of the English-speaking world and its diverse subsidiaries, which – like Latin American intellectuals scattered in the wake of the region’s wave of military coups in the 1960s and 1970s – were quickly finding themselves assembled into a political, economic and epistemic space that was then beginning to be called global.

During its first decade and a half, the journal’s postal and intellectual home alternated between the cafeterias and cultural spaces of the South Bank and King’s College on London’s Strand, across the Thames. More recently, much like Latin American cultural studies itself, it has become a more trans-Atlantic venue with multiple locations. In past years the journal’s annual conferences have taken place at Austin, Zurich, Oxford and Mexico City. With the departure over time of its founding generation and the geographical as well as intellectual diversification of its editorial committee, the Journal itself continues to change and develop into new directions. Rather than the registration and expansive consolidation of the discipline that dominates much of the production in cultural studies today, the journal sees its mission more in the unsettling and interrogation of such routines. In that vein, we would like to invite scholars and critics with diverse intellectual and disciplinary affiliations to join us in rethinking the very notion of cultural studies and its location and function in the conversation between different, and unevenly developed, sites of academic and cultural production. The intensifying crisis of the universities and education in the journal’s various ambits of circulation is of course no minor aspect of this discussion. With the increase in publishing rhythm from three to four issues per year, we have opened up spaces for this dimension of critical self-reflection of the field and its directions, including the re-introduction of a regular reviews section and the publication, roughly in every other issue, of interviews with intellectuals and artists on their trajectories that will add the longer view to contemporary discussions.