This panel seeks to reflect on the significance of literary aesthetics in anti-imperial cultural production in the last one-hundred years. Participants push back against the idea of aesthetics as inherently Eurocentric and the false binary of politics versus aesthetics. Each paper is concerned with the specific formal and aesthetic devices of the literary as related to the politics of anti-imperialism. Papers in the panel engage with aesthetic forms that stubbornly resist being contained into a historical period or a geographical space and are thusly repurposed against imperialism and in the imagination of post-imperial horizons. To allow for a theoretical consideration of literary form in a focused way, two of the papers in the panel address poetry, and two engage with the Gothic. The papers answer shared questions on the articulation of literary forms and aesthetics with the concrete history of Latin America’s resistance to U.S. imperialism, in relation to the Cold War, interventionism, colonial dispossession and borders.

All four panelists have agreed to present papers that last no longer than 12-minutes to afford discussion and questions from the audience. As far as diversity, the panel includes scholars at three different ranks (assistant professor, associate professor and endowed chair). Three of the panelists are LatinX/ Latin American and one white. Two of the panelists are men and two are women. Each of the four panelists works in a different kind of programs: English, Romance Studies, Latin American Studies and Spanish.

Aestheticism and politics are often seen as mutually exclusive, but recent books like Caroline Levine’s The Activist Humanist and Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy seek to upend such claims. Scholars of Latin American literature and of the relationship between literature and imperialism have long explored these questions, but this perspective is often obscured in US-centric debates. This panel renders visible (hence the connection to the presidential topic) Latin American and LatinX traditions in which complex and autonomous aesthetics have an inherent and indissoluble relationship with political affordance, not only in terms of representation, but also in terms of contributing to traditions of activism and political resistance.

In these terms, the panel opens with Sarah Quesada’s presentation, “Egyptian Aesthetics, Latinx-American Politics.” Quesada addresses the deployment of Egyptian aesthetics in Mexican and Latinx writing through ideologies of “south-south cosmopolitanism”. This paper is focused on how two poets—Octavio Paz and Víctor Hernández Cruz—employ the neoliberal developmentalist ethos surrounding both Egyptian antiquity and Cold war era Egyptian aesthetics. Quesada assesses the valorization of these aesthetics drawn from a Cold war-era nostalgia of internationalist (or “Nasserist”) rhetoric, and other forms of Egyptian neoliberal nationalisms. Quesada studies literature as a way to link the aesthetic and ideological forms of developmental nationalisms across the Global South.

Luis Othoniel Rosa’s “Slow flow and dark: Gothic, Baroque and Empire in the Caribbean” argues that the baroque and the gothic are literary aesthetics that emerge in the Caribbean as reaction and resistance to the surplus of destruction that Empire and Capital leave behind: aesthetics that challenge modern velocities, rationalist impositions, and racist monoculturalisms. The focus will on Marta Aponte Alsina’s novels in relation to their baroque and gothic Caribbean genealogy. The paper does not to make a philological argument but rather claims that, in the Caribbean, the aesthetics of slowness (the hermeticism of the baroque) and horror (the darkness of the gothic) emerge as paths for a postcapitalist and decolonizing sensibility.

Patricia Stuelke’s “Horror and the Anti-Imperialist Feminist Strike Form” explores in which women writers have repurposed the conventions of horror fiction to map the relationships between historical structures of colonial dispossession and contemporary manifestations of extractive capitalist and imperialist violence. This paper focuses on Mariana Enriquez’s 2019 novel Nuestra Parte de Noche. It considers what the novel’s supernatural rendering/memory of Argentina’s 1970s-1980s Dirty War and US-backed military dictatorship might contribute to the project of crafting an anti-imperialist literary horror aesthetic that can accompany the new feminist strike form.

Ignacio Sánchez Prado’s “Binational Aesthetics. Poetry Towards Border Abolition” focuses on the way in which poets who function in the binational space between Mexico and the United States work towards poetic forms that formally and politically envision the horizon of border abolition. Contemporary binational poetry puts forward a literary aesthetics in which experimental forms, aesthetic genealogies and linguistic slippages reconfigure English-language writing beyond its imperial groundings. This point will be explored through the examples from three texts: Robin Myers’s “Diego de Montemayor”, Violeta Orozco’s The Broken Woman Diaries and Alan López Peláez’s intergalactic travels. poems from a fugitive alien.