Latinx Archival Forms

Lott, Olivia; Lott, Olivia

This special session will explore contemporary Latinx literary engagements with archival materials (historical documents, legal proceedings, maps, testimony, literary texts, etc.). Our lineup of papers brings together authors who take up methods such as erasure, translation, blackout, collage, and other documentary modes to create something new by re-signifying and rearranging preexisting materials. Our conversation joins ongoing calls for careful engagements with the deep roots of Latinx literature in the United States. From Nicolas Kanellos’s 1990s archival reclamation project “Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage” to Rodrigo Lazo and Jesse Alemán’s edited collection The Latino Nineteenth Century (2016) and the recent inauguration of the archival-focused Latinx journal Pasados (est. 2024), archival studies continue to be one of the most exciting frontiers in Latinx literature. However, the question of how contemporary Latinx writers engage creatively with archival material has mostly remained peripheral to this conversation. Through this special session, we aim to examine how the archive emerges in “original” works of Latinx literature to facilitate mediations on history, originality, and interconnected oppressive systems such as imperialism, heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism, and border militarization. Our panel will consider how these archival forms produce dual calls: to diversity methodological approaches to Latinx literatures, and to think across the conventional borders of scholarly analysis—whether national, linguistic, or disciplinary.

We have assembled a group of presenters who will approach our topic and these questions from a variety of perspectives. Michael Dowdy—who may be considered to have definitively opened the conversation of interest to us in his 2020 article “Shakeout Poetics”—reconsiders Valeria Luiselli’s already-canonical novel Lost Children Archive (2019). Dowdy examines how the novel dramatizes troubling questions about archives, such as the following: What happens when an archive becomes a fetish? What happens when “archive fever” is disconnected from political and social movements? What kinds of archives can Latinx children build? Dowdy’s paper establishes an essential foundation from which other papers depart. Mariajosé Rodríguez Pliego takes up Justin Torres’s call to understand the author as a goldsmith who searches for precious materials to forge into a new form. She reads Torres’s Blackouts (2023) alongside Anthony Cody and Hugo García Manríquez’s erasure poetry in Borderland Apocrypha (2020) and Anti-Humboldt (2015), respectively. She traces a growing genealogy of Latinx goldsmiths back to M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008) and its search for glimpses of stories in a violent historical document. Whitney DeVos analyzes how Catalina Cariaga’s Cultural Evidence (1999) deconstructs narratives surrounding the Philippines and the Filipino diaspora in the U.S. through archival collage. DeVos asks us to consider how Cariaga’s citational practice challenges assumed cartographies of Latinx studies that privileges certain sites of focus (namely, the US/Mexico borderlands, New York, and Miami). “Filipinicity,” she argues, offers a transhemispheric, multilingual, polyethnic, and multi-sited approach to contemporary Latinx literatures. Lastly, Francesca Dennstedt’s paper analyzes cross-border narratives surrounding the early years of the AIDS crisis during the 1980s and 1990s alongside archives of sexuality and gender dissidence. Dennstedt examines documents, maps, literary texts, as well as an ephemeral archive that includes embodied practices like rituals, healing techniques, and memory pathways. Finally, Dennstedt draws on her own experience growing up on the US/Mexico border and her family’s history in the pharmaceutical industry to investigate how autotheory can aid in creating transnational archives for histories that remain under-documented. Olivia Lott will preside over this conversation.

Our proposal brings together academics from English, Modern Languages, and Latin American Studies departments who hold a variety of academic ranks at a variety of institutions: a full professor at a private R2, an independent scholar and translator based in Mexico City, two assistant professors at a private R1 and a public R2 respectively, and a postdoc at an Ivy League university. Our presenters have personal, emotional, and intellectual ties to their objects of study. The papers we propose here analyze work by a diverse range of writers, in terms of race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship status. Moreover, the approaches taken by our presenters center methodological shifts (Appalachian-Latinx connections, “Filipinicity,” autotheory) that are essential to the continued diversification of Latinx literary studies.

Our session will ensure that we operate within the allotted time. We already communicated to our panelists that their acceptance of our invitation to form part of this application is contingent on their willingness to limit their presentation to 12 to 15 minutes. This format will allow for at least 15 minutes of unstructured discussion. During the session, our presider will ensure that this timeline is followed.

142 Latinx Archival Forms: Calls for Papers