Deadline: December 23, 2022
Contact: Andrew C. Rajca, Associate Professor of Portuguese and Spanish, University of South Carolina
Email: rajca@sc.edu
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
This panel seeks to examine diverse examples of cultural production engaging with environmental issues in Latin America, Spain, and Portugal through a critical cultural studies lens. We are especially interested in papers that examine theoretical approaches and cultural works such as film, literature, performances, or music articulated from these regions—and in Spanish, Portuguese, or Indigenous languages—that enter into critical dialogue with global debates surrounding an ecological commons.
Some possible questions that this panel seeks to examine include: How can non-Western epistemologies and experiences articulated from the Global South be incorporated with equal footing into inter- or trans-disciplinary conceptualizations of the commons? How can the very notion of the “commons” be problematized when considering the continued violent practices of extraction, growth, and capital development throughout regions such as Latin America—even under governments who espouse environmental, climate, economic, and racial justice as central to their programs? In what ways can the diverse and conflicting subjectivities among different Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities within specific areas of the Global South be taken into account? How are the everyday lives and subjectivities of those living in areas such as the Amazon Basin or the “Lithium Triangle” in Latin America often elided from or appropriated within global conceptualizations of resource “commons”? How can ecological thought, activism, and cultural practices articulated in languages other than English truly be engaged in decolonial approaches in the environmental humanities? What relational modes of solidarity and understanding can be activated by cultural production in/from Latin America, Spain, and Portugal—and beyond— to contribute to an open and dynamic conceptualization of the commons for both human and non-human beings?
Posted on December 13, 2022
