“New Materialisms in Latin America” is a session that explores material approaches to Latin American canonical texts. This inquiry departs from the posthuman turn that, in the last couple of decades, has set critical theory to rethink our understandings of matter and the nonhuman. Against previous conceptions of matter as inert, posthuman approaches have engaged with objecthood in more vitalist and less hierarchical modes. From Butler's seminal intervention in the field of feminism—which opposed to the coincidence of gender with sex in the biological body—, there have been many theoretical contributions that have questioned purist understandings of culture and nature, humans and nonhumans, organic and inorganic matter, and have proposed more hybrid interpretations of the networks in which these elements intervene (Latour 1993).

In the midst of the current political and environmental crisis, these broader interpretations present themselves as viable responses to questionable politics of class, race, and gender within the human, and our larger engagement with animals, plants, and objects in our surroundings. Though largely explored in the context of the Global North by authors such as Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad, Jane Bennett and Timothy Morton, these new understandings of matter, objects, and the material have not been reflected upon extensively in the context of the Global South. Taking as point of departure the work of Hector Hoyos—who will officiate as our presider and guide our discussion—, particularly his recent contributions to the field in “A Tale of Two Materialisms,” this session aims to further the conversation at the crossroads of New Materialism and Latin American Studies.

All three papers in this session share an understanding of materialism at the intersection of two materialist approaches: “one is the study of things as a means to reveal the true nature of social relations, an approach rooted in critical theory” and another one that “considers objects as autonomous nonhuman entities” (Hoyos 2018). This particular understanding of Latin American Materialism—set at the crossroads of historical materialism and object oriented ontologies, and for which Hoyos coins the term transcultural materialism—sees in literary imagination a privileged space for Latin America to reassess its historical and material situation. That is why this session focuses on canonical texts and authors, hoping to shed new light over how seminal narratives have had the power to negotiate agency. That is, how the literary regional canon can operate as a fruitful space where to think of ourselves and our materiality, and reflect upon our modes of relating to objects. In general lines, all three presentations analyze how literary devices create engagements with matter that are key for the understanding Latin American historical identities.

In “Black Objects,” Raquel Albarrán proposes a reading of the life and oeuvre of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg—a canonical nineteenth century and early twentieth century intellectual who was influential in the cultural landscape of the black Caribbean. Albarrán argues that emancipatory notions of objethood are mobilized by black Caribbean and Latinx American subjects to speak of the crisis of representation that operates upon black embodiment. She sustains that in contrast with Frantz Fanon’s understanding of the black object (Black Skin, White Masks 1952), Schomburg’s earlier notion of objecthood develops a certain kinship with the object that reveals its shared material articulation with blackness within modernity’s grid of intelligibility.

In “The Ethos of Care,” Ashley Brock’s reading of El beso de la mujer araña (1976)—Manuel Puig’s now-classic novel set during Argentina’s last military dictatorship—claims that the indeterminacy of corporal existence lies at the heart of Puig’s political project. Beyond suggesting an ethics that does not depend on making the limits between species and identities, Brock proposes that the centrality of the body points to the embodied practice of care (Bellacasa 2017) as the central ethos at play in the novel. She says that though Puig stops short of suggesting that care is enough to disarm the dehumanizing violence of the military state, he presents the feminine-coded, situated, embodied, and transactional work of caring as every bit as subversive as masculine-coded, transcendent, abstract, and disinterested forms of political commitment.

In “The Case of Meat,” Valeria Meiller reads El matadero—Argentina’s first fictional piece, written by Esteban Echeverría in 1839, that takes place in a slaughterhouse—as a text where carne, a signifier that stands both for both human flesh and animal meat, functions as the privilege matter where to read the ontological indetermination that underlies to the conceptualization of the human; and, secondly, how this indetermination has operated in the construction of a postcolonial identity in Argentina. Departing from the concept of “vibrant matter” (Bennett 2010) and “impurity” (Shotwell 2016), Meiller argues that the sacrificial act of the slaughterhouse exposes the hybrid human-animal assemblages that operate within Argentina’s national identity, intimately dependent of cattle and the meat industry.

Each of these three presentations will last around fifteen minutes, and will be followed by an in depth discussion facilitated by Héctor Hoyos. This discussion will focus on the elements the papers share together, and what are the specificities of their understandings of the material. At the same time, the discussion will aim to pinpoint aspects of these texts that materialist readings can help to highlight, and that may have been overlooked by previous critical readings. As per our understanding, this will be the first panel in the MLA convention to explicitly look at the Latin American canon through the lens of New Materialism, which will also result in further reflecting about the challenges of reframing northern theory in a Global South context.