Due to the development of capitalism in its neo-liberal version on a global scale, Latin-American societies have gone through significant social and economic transformations since the middle of the twentieth century. In this panel, the presentations will focus on the cases of Mexico and Peru, and how their contemporary literature is addressing these transformations by re-envisioning the recent history of these countries and imagining their future. In Mexico for example, dynamics of subalternity vis-à-vis the United States and the “Drug War” determine the production and control of the population —what Michel Foucault theorized as biopolitics— according to their roles in the market. In this dynamic, the management of the bare life of the citizens is embedded in the political order —the permanent “state of exception” of Giorgio Agamben—. This includes the production of bodies that are functional to hegemonic ideologies and the elimination of peoples that are considered a menace for the existence of the social body. We can see this in Peru as well, where racialization of regional spaces and populations justifies violence deployed for the sake of “security”, against its citizens, as it happened in the armed conflict between 1980-2000 when indigenous communities where massively victimized both by the State and rebel forces.

These processes are developed through intense transformations of biopolitics, that become more sophisticated to produce and manage cultural differences in Latin-American societies. Contemporary Peruvian and Mexican narratives intervene in these transformations, by negotiating the different kinds of apparatus that racialize and sexualize populations according to hegemonic designs. They do so by constructing monstrous, hybrid and mechanized bodies that populate infernal, apocalyptic or dystopian worlds. These are biopolitical figures that articulate the complexities of racialization and sexualization of the population according to hegemonic designs. Our panel proposes that in their excesses —and sometimes despite their authors’ intentions—, these figures contest the technologies used by the State to “protect” its citizens. Thus, these narratives challenge the mechanisms of regulation that produce and reproduce normality, the ideology of progress in Latin-America that establishes the subaltern destiny of the region in the current world order.

To secure plenty of time for the discussion with the audience, our four presenters will limit each individual presentation to 11 minutes. Our first two panelists will develop their analysis in Peruvian texts, and the other two will study narratives from Mexico.

First, Dr. Lorena Cuya Gavilano examines monstrous images of migrants in Peruvian narratives as responses to the failures of modernizing and neo-liberal agendas. From the 1970s until the post-conflict period, these narratives illustrate emotional and bodily disfunctions as central components in the representation of migratory experiences. The works of José María Arguedas, Cronwell Jara, Daniel Alarcón, and Santiago Roncagliolo exemplify the effects of economic and political violence, as well as the use of biopolitical discipline on many displaced citizens. In their novels, sick, mad, depressed, and infectious migrants become the locus of socio-political battlegrounds. Images of migrants as monstrous figures, deformed or reformed by the discipline and mishaps of modernization and the terrorist war, not only inundate contemporary Peruvian fictions but reflect the insanity of new economic and political ideologies.

Second, and in close dialogue with Cuya Gavilano’s paper, Cesar Romero Fernández analyses the disruptive masculine body of an indigenous revolutionary in a novel about the armed conflict in Peru: Rosa Cuchillo (1997), by Oscar Colchado. In this novel, we witness the last days of a member of the Shining Path who dies in combat, and we follow the steps of his mother through the world of the death, where she tries to find him. Romero focuses on the intersections of race, masculinity, and class to show how the male protagonist’s indigeneity makes him an unfit masculine subject both for the biopolitical power of the State and the ideology of the rebel forces. Narratively and symbolically constructed as a "homo sacer" (Agamben), this character problematizes the dynamics of “coloniality of power” (Quijano) by incorporating the entanglements of biopolitics, necropolitics (Mbembe) and gender construction.

Then, we move to the Mexican narrative with Jonathan Godinez, who studies the relationship between biopolitics, technology, and the human body and mind through two Mexican science fiction short stories: “e” (2001) by Bernardo Fernandez and Gerardo Sifuentes, and “Ruido Gris” (1996) by Pepe Rojo. In these works, Godinez examines how technology, surveillance, and violence are intertwined with Corporate Power, and how this power manifest in the human body through the figure of the cyborg (Brown, Haraway). In these narratives, it is not only the physical body that is transformed, altered or controlled through technology, but also the human mind, engaging in a process of what Bernard Stiegler calls grammatization, where memory becomes the object of biopolitical control. How these writers engage with these forms of subjugation is the primary concern of this presentation.

Finally, Andrew Holzman analyses a novel on Mexican Drug War to highlight how capitalism has fortified itself using the image of the hero to preserve the false promise that the subject can transcend the limits of his body by engaging in war to restore his dignity. This study examines how Arrecife (2012) by Juan Villoro problematizes the “overman” (Nietzsche) in the context of the “War on Drugs” who due to his perseverance when faced with the obstacles of modern life has the obligation to act as a model and transmit his “superior” values to the masses. Arrecife renders the hero pathetic because his participation in war leads to melancholy and does not garner him personal and corporeal autonomy. While heroism reproduces the logic of Empire, this novel opens modes of being that reject the heroic body.

These four papers underline the complex and new technologies of biopolitics in Peru and Mexico, and how they are discussed in their narrative. At the last part of the panel, we will open a dialogue with the audience on the similarities and differences among the presented cases, instead of presenting a general response to all of them. This way, we will encourage the interchange of ideas with the public.