This panel studies the relationship between literary form and illegality in Latin American literature. In particular, it presents novel approaches to theorize the illegal dimension of Latin American economies and cultures in relation to the deepening inequality produced by the capitalist world system. The main question guiding this panel is: How does Latin American cultural production register illegal economies produced by the circulation of capital in the region? In other words, how do accumulation (Marx 1867) and narco-accumulation (Williams 2021) in Latin American societies account for the global circulation of capital? As a whole, this panel suggests that the importation of literary forms in Latin America (Schwarz 2020) registers the persistent illegal forces that have affected our social practices and cultural expressions. Illegality can, therefore, be approached simultaneously as an expression of past struggles, a reflection on the existing conditions of neoliberalism, and a template of futurity.

The panel builds on materialist approaches in the Humanities, social sciences, and literary studies (Tucker-Abramson 2018; Lesjak 2021). While interest in illegal economies and drug trafficking has led Latin American studies to reflect on topics such as subjectivity (Moraña 2010), ethics and ideology (Suárez 2010; Martínez 2020), and globalization (Nicholson 2022), these approximations on narco narratives or political violence have yet to account for the relationship between literary form and the impact of illegality on capitalism in the region. This panel explores how this particular relationship allows us to better understand the connections between the cultural logic of our present moment and the social struggles underlying illegal activities: from inclusion and equality (who is the illegal economy for?) to capitalist expansion, extractivism, demographic change, and international forced migration (what is the illegal economy for?).

Focusing on the novels La mala hierba (1981) by Juan Gossaín and El leopardo al sol (1993) by Laura Restrepo, in “Sexuality, Race, and Extractivism in the Literature of Colombia’s Marijuana Boom,” Lauren Mehfoud considers that these narratives attempt to explain the emergence of the illegal economy using racialized stereotypes of Indigenous sexuality and reproduction. Drawing from the rhetoric of environmental determinism and racial degeneration, these novels justify the displacement of Indigenous populations through drug war militarism. Mehfoud explains how these narratives attribute the illegal drug trade to racialized tropes of “primitiveness,” falsely criminalizing Indigenous populations, justify their displacement, and open their territories to developing extractive industries.

In “«La maldición de una estirpe»: Anomic Narcos Destroying their Families in Hijos de la nieve (2000) by José Libardo Porras,” Andrea Carrillo explores how this work critiques the replacement of Carlos Alberto González’s traditional norms and values by narrating the destruction of his family when he becomes a junior narco in Medellín, Colombia. Carrillo reads the destruction of Carlos’ family as an allegory of what Jean Franco terms “cruel modernity” (2013). The arrival of neoliberalism in Carlos and his family’s life represents a normative shock for them. Consequently, he pays a cruel price for entering modernity: destroying his family and himself by becoming anomic while following neoliberal logic in his illicit affairs.

In “Illegal Accumulation: The Colombian Novel and Peripheral Realism,” Lenin Lozano-Guzman invokes Majumder’s (2021) recent claim that postcolonial texts are “interlinked instantiations of a literary world-system shaped by capitalism” (26) to develop the notion of peripheral aesthetics to analyze the articulation of local and core-metropolitan ideas in peripheral societies. Studying land dispossession and drug-trafficking in the works of Gabriel García Márquez, Gustavo Álvarez, and Laura Restrepo, Lozano illuminates how illegal economies become integral to a postcolonial society that arrests the simultaneous presence of non-capitalist and capitalist social relations; therefore, peripheral realism in Colombia accounts for the persistence of the oligarchy in the trajectory of accumulation and commodity export.

Finally, in “Laughter and Hugs Captured from a Hidden Market: The novela negra and representations of affect in Óscar Martínez’s Los migrantes que no importan (2010),” José Jarquin offers a reflection on Gareth Williams’ term of narco-accumulation through the case of Central American migrants, unregulated by the legal institutions, that must embark on the journey through Mexico to reach their destination in the United States. Analyzing Martínez’s chronicles, Jarquin demonstrates how the “novela negra” provides the opportunity for making visible the migrants Martínez encounters as humans and not as commodities, by establishing a gritty setting in which certain moments of affect resonate due to their contrast with the surrounding danger.

This panel will be presided by Américo Mendoza-Mori. All presentations will be limited to 12 minutes to allow for at least 20 minutes of unstructured discussion following the presentations.