This panel delves into various manifestations of Latin American literary and cinematic activism in relation to the ideas of the collective they mobilize. The panelists share a concern for forms of the collective in literature and cinema, both in their representations ("the mass", "the people", "Latin American literature"), and in the organization of the creative procedures, as collaborative writing/filming, or interventions in the circulation of books and films.

We align this reimagining of the collective in the Latin American neoliberal framework with recent critical literature that points to its effects on specific cultural subfields (Fermín Rodríguez, Neoliberalismo y literatura 2022; Sánchez Prado, Strategic Occidentalism: on Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the question of World Literature, 2018 and Screening neoliberalism : transforming Mexican cinema 1988-2012, 2014). This reimagining is also complemented by political theory’s growing interest in the emergence of forms of the common (populisms, masses, feminist strikes, large street demonstrations). For example, Verónica Gago (Neoliberalism from below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies, 2017), argues for the existence of collective subjectivities and rationalities that resist the ethos of neoliberal individualizing profitability, while incorporating much of its calculus. Furthermore, in her Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), Judith Butler interrogates the political and performative power enabled by the encounter of precarious bodies. Our panel attends to modes of collective literary and cinematic action/activism that object to the privatization and precarization of the Latin American experience, where the effects of a neoliberal reason are questioned from the action of novel associative links, their impasses, possibilities, and their aesthetic effects.

The panel features four junior academics and graduate students at different stages of their academic journeys who delve into these questions through various cases spanning different times and geographies. Presentations will be tailored to last approximately 12-15 minutes, fostering extensive dialogue and exchange among panelists and the audience afterward.

Alan Mendoza opens the session by delving into the unprecedented “Las Yubartas”, a multinational literary fiction award introduced by nine independent publishers from Latin America, Spain, and the US at the FILNYC 2023. The winner of “Las Yubartas” not only receive a cash prize and a share of book sales, but they will also see their work simultaneously published by all participating presses. While an important milestone in Latin American publishing challenges, this prize's focus on Spanish may perpetuate unequal language hierarchies, excluding Indigenous or nonstandard Spanish. Additionally, its strong association with New York and U.S. literary networks could consolidate their dominance in Latin American literature, widening economic and political disparities.

Isabella Vergara moves the discussion towards institutional academic spaces, focusing on the Revista de la Universidad de México. Since its foundation in 1930, the magazine has only had two female editors. Under the command of the second, Mexican writer Guadalupe Nettel, the publication began in 2017 a stage of literary activism and political friendship that has expanded Latin American and Mexican cultural distributions to other authors and topics. Vergara focuses on the dossier on "Magic" (March 2022) and its discursive proposal as an example of enabling undisciplined spaces where friendship emerges as a collaborative force that unfolds in multiplicities that are refractory to any homogenization.

Oriele Benavides focuses on literary activism situated at the heart of neoliberalism and its Latin American origins. By evaluating the 1st International Conference of Feminine Literature (Santiago de Chile, 1987), she examines how a group of women writers encoded a radical anti-dictatorial gesture in the form of a literary discussion, challenging the patriarchal foundation of the Pinochet dictatorship but also the misogyny of the post-boom literary tradition. Benavides traces the alteration of the signifier "woman," essentialized and effectively instrumentalized by the military regime from its beginnings, later reclaimed by anti-dictatorship women's movements, and ultimately destabilized as political potency at the Conference.

Finally, Thomas Matusiak explores Los Ingrávidos, an audiovisual collective founded in 2011 that has revived the legacy of global counter-cinemas from the 1970s, aiming to disrupt the ideology of the moving image in Mexico’s necropolitical present. Matusiak's analysis delves into how Los Ingrávidos’ intermedial triptych, "Faces in the Crowd" (2019), addresses the contemporary crisis of political aesthetics. Shot on expired 16mm film and digitally manipulated, the film simultaneously reflects on cinema's exhaustion in the digital age and the weakening of the people amid neoliberalism's impact on the nation-state. Rather than treating the face as a symbol of the national-popular, "Faces in the Crowd" envisions a new intermedial politics that captures the affective intensities of the crowd through the digital degradation of the cinematic image.