This panel studies the ways in which Latin America has informed the global political and cultural imagination for the past few decades. The scholars gathered in this panel have written landmark books on the topic, which have influenced the discussion across different subfields. The panel joins two established scholars (Sánchez Prado and Graff Zivin) with extensive work not he matter, with two emerging academics (Quesada and Stuelke) whose first books are paradigm-changing takes of Latin America's relationship to the world. The rationale for organizing this panel is precisely to bring the work of these scholars together for the first time, and put it in dialogue. In addition, all papers engage critically with theorists who have thought the question of the world, the global and the archive, and the ways in which thinking from and about Latin America force a reconsideration of cultural mappings of the worlds and its politics.

The general topic of the panel will be treated by bringing, in each of the papers, a significant case study that provides a concrete perspective on how Latin American culture has informed different articulations of the political and cultural imagination of the world. Quesada's paper engages Mexican writer María Luisa Puga’s Las posibilidades del odio (1978) with Togolese writer Sami Tchak’s Les filles de Mexico (2008) to confront how South-South narratives of commitment construct future solidarities despite the alleged failure of leftist revolutions and decolonial politics of the Cold War era. For Quesada, both Tchak and Puga share a critical nostalgia for a Third World solidarity never to be that is not without prescience for its contemporary reader, and not without glimmers of hope for a Global South solidarity yet to be.

Sánchez Prado discusses the way in which Latin American politics has been an essential referent for global cinema's of solidarity. The paper focuses on Costa Gravras's Missing (1982), on political persecution during the Chilean dictatorship, and Andreas Fontana's Azor (2021), on the relationship between Swiss Banks and the Argentine dictatorship, to trace the ways in which Left-leaning European cinema projects unto Latin American politics narratives of critique of imperialism and capitalism. Both films use Latin America to map the undercurrents of capitalism and power as constitute to contemporary global politics. The paper will, in this argument, discuss critically the models of cinema and globalization developed by thinkers like Frederic Jameson and Robert Stam.

Stuelke is interested in the ways in which some novelists across the Americas have turned to the form of the “archive novel,” a novel that explicitly styles itself as an archive, exposing the limitations of state and non-profit attempts to create or correct or hide “official records” while reimagining novel-writing itself as a curatorial practice of research and imagination. With a focus on Rodrigo Rey Rosa's El material humano (2008), the paper asks what form “archival thinking”—Weld’s term for a historical method of thinking critically about archival construction rather than just citing archives and archival research—Rey Rosa’s autofiction enables or precludes, and how it contributes to a broader understanding of the archival interests and practices of contemporary fiction in the Americas.

Graff Zivin proposes two distinct, yet simultaneous, approaches to Latin American literary studies today, linked through the motif of “distortion.” The first approach distorts the discipline by extending, breaking, or shifting its established boundaries, including the very definition of “Latin American” and “literary studies.” The second imagines a critical praxis for Latin American studies that itself distorts the objects of (disciplinary) study. Her case study is Argentinian filmmaker Narcisa Hirsch, whose experimental films appropriate, cannibalize, draw inspiration from, respond to, and distort works of world culture across disciplines, including sound art (Steve Reich), film (Michael Snow, Michelangelo Antonioni), music (Nina Simone), and literature (J.L. Borges, Julio Cortázar). In thi engaging obliquely with aesthetic, ethical, and political problems that are not always legible as such, the paper argues, one can envision a new or renewed Latinamericanism would distort its objects by opening them—or by bearing witness to their opening—to other objects, other genres, other media, and other territories

Taken together, the papers advance a notion of Latin American culture that troubles and redefines the idea of the global. The papers are organically conceived to bring into the same conversations the work that all four scholars have developed in their research. Mindful of time requirements, we all commit to present 15 minute papers that lay out the main points in a clear and direct manner to allow for the required 15 minutes of questions and answers.