In Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times, Ann Stoler reminds us that political concepts both “conceal the scenes of their making” and “intervene in the allocation of power.” Calling attention to the naturalization of the noun “colony” to the extent that it does not seem like a political concept at all, Stoler ranges over the penal, military, settler, and nineteenth-century agricultural colony, inviting further theorization of the colony as concept, its affiliations with other modes of governance, and its persistence into the present. In this spirit, Goyal’s paper, “Camp Form,” stages a productive dialogue between “colony” and “camp” in postcolonial and Latinx studies today to discern their common making and unmaking. Reading twenty-first century refugee novels from Palestine, Mexico, the United States, and Cameroon which feature extended scenes of life lived in a refugee camp alongside their meditation on the afterlife of postcolonial failure, Goyal describes an aesthetic “camp form” taking shape. Goyal’s goal is to identify the literary equivalent of this phenomena, thus updating postcolonial conceptions of nation as narration in the age of migration by foregrounding border imperialism.
Similarly, Guzmán’s paper, “A lesson on Expulsion: sensationalist literature and the camp,” traces an equally important contemporary concept: expulsion. In her recent Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in a Global Economy, Saskia Sassen argues that in an increasingly integrated world of financial and political crisis, “new logics of expulsion” have emerged in brutally simplistic forms and as answers to the “complex institutions, systems, and techniques that require specialized knowledge and intricate organizational formats.” These brutally simplistic outcomes to complex problems are materialized in “acute” warehouses of displaced people such as (in)formal refugee camps, prisons, “ghettos and slums.” While logics of expulsions intensified under President Obama’s immigration policies, it was surely on display and sensationalized under the Trump administration, crystalized into images of crying children in cages. This paper will argue that these brutally simplistic logics of expulsion also undergird the sensational genre of U.S./Mexico immigration literature best exemplified in the controversy over Jeanine Cummings American Dirt. Guzmán contends that novels like American Dirt formalize the logics of expulsion by sensationalizing complicated systems of displacement into consumable simplistic narratives. Meanwhile, Erika Sanchéz’s lauded debut collection of poems Lesson on Expulsion, published one year prior to Cummings, feature lyrical representation of immigration and sexual violence. He will contend that Sanchéz’s Lesson on Expulsion ought to be read as a foil in scale to Cummings’ American Dirt to the extent that Sanchez’s lyrical form deliberately obscures and complicates an otherwise simple lesson: that dispossession’s ur-commodity form is sensational literature and its aestheticization of powerlessness.
Lastly, Saldaña-Portillo paper, “Indigenizing Freedom at the Cortes de Cádiz,” turns to 19th century expressions of Spanish colonial governmentality in Europe, America, and the Philippines by examining the Cortes de Cádiz and the 1812 Constitution. Portillo takes up three moments of speculative freedom in the constitutional debates—sovereignty, Indian citizenship, and casta non-citizenship—to consider how peninsular and Creole parliamentary representation, freedom, and equality were accomplished through the perceived differences and similarities among themselves, indios, and castas pardas. Historiography has misinterpreted the Cortes and 1812 Constitution as reiterations of French and Anglo-American revolutionary actions and liberal principles. Instead, this talk considers the Cortes within an Atlantic-world framework, considering the rich and varied interplay between Spanish and American delegates who were forging liberal principles for both sides of the Atlantic (and the Philippines) from the experience of the colony. If Benedict Anderson is correct in his assumption that the Americas gave us the nation form, then, Portillo argues, it is the Indigenous peoples, with Afro-mestizo and mestizo castas, who, through their encounter with colonial freedom, forged the liberal notions of freedom and equality. The 1812 Constitution is one moment in the history of Indigenous, mestizo, and Afro-Indigenous speculation decolonizing the colony.
In this exciting collaboration between the Latina/o Literature and Postcolonial studies forums, we hope to shed light on two important political concepts that in turn reveal how working conditions in global capitalism extend from legacies of colonization and the intensifying logics of expulsion.