For the Twenty-Ninth Graduate Student Conference of the Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures Program at the Graduate Center, The City University of New York, the organizing committee invites researchers in cultural studies, intellectual history, linguistics, art history, and related disciplines to submit their work examining and analyzing cultures of extermination in cultural productions across Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Iberian Peninsula. The conference will take place in New York City on April 10-11, 2025. Applications can be submitted through the following form.
Deadline to send abstracts: November 15th
Since its emergence on the European stage, the history of the Americas has been marked by a complex network of transoceanic projects that have driven the eradication of ideas, languages, ethnicities, and populations across much of the globe. The extermination of Indigenous populations and the devastation of landscapes fueled by extractivism and slavery since the 16th century, the accelerated eradication of Indigenous languages and cultural practices during the formation of nation-states in the 19th century, and the exercise of state violence against dissident and marginalized groups in the 20th and 21st centuries are some of the episodes that have shaped the cultural map of Ibero-America and the Caribbean.
We understand cultures of extermination as any systematic attempt by institutions, governments, policies, state apparatuses, and other disciplinary mechanisms to destroy populations that have been othered within discursive regimes. Since Fray Bartolomé de las Casas with his seminal Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552), the history of these geographies and their representations has been marked by repression, annihilation, and survival practices by communities and populations. This conference seeks to engage with studies on these pivotal moments in our history, such as the Conquest of the Desert in Argentina, the War of Canudos in Brazil, or the extermination of the Patriotic Union in Colombia during the rise of paramilitarism, among many other tragic events that populate the regional history.
Furthermore, we consider it essential to highlight survival practices in response to technologies of extermination. Unlike neoliberal resilience, this concept refers to a creative attitude and a non-passive micropolitical action to adapt to the conditions imposed by control mechanisms on both human and non-human life. It is an act of emergence, a gesture of making oneself visible in the face of the erasures brought about by policies and techniques of suppression of life forms that are discordant with disciplinary logics. Survival is a challenge to the imposition of a monocultural horizon and to the subjugation of living bodies to a prescribed way of inhabiting the world.
For the XXIX Graduate Student Conference, we invite presentations that address these issues and engage with the following thematic axes:
- Processes of racialization, division of labor, and the struggle for survival.
- Narratives of extermination: testimonies of survival in contexts of repression.
- Repression in Latin American discourse.
- Cultural, artistic, and intellectual reactions to armed conflicts.
- Collective and popular forms of survival.
- Survival of sexual minorities: patriarchy as a regime of extermination.
- Ecocide as genocide: Negrocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene, and environmental humanities in the face of climate destruction.
- Standardization, language, and politics in institutional efforts to eradicate languages and dialects.
- The U.S.-Mexico border: the transition between annihilation and survival.
- Speculative futures: science fiction, posthumanism, and the end/rebirth of the world.
- Repression and survival in colonial and Peninsular productions (16th-18th centuries).
- Representations of genocides in Latin America.
- Civilization and barbarism: the European civilizing project as ethnocide in the consolidation of Latin American nation-states in the 19th and 20th centuries.
- Necropolitics and biopolitics.
