Call for Papers: Negotiating Identities in Latin American Cultures
January 30, 2004
Rosza Centre, University of Calgary

Keynote Speakers:

• John C. Chasteen, University of North Carolina
• Debra Ann Castillo, Cornell University

Conference Organizers:

• Hendrik Kraay, Department of History, University of Calgary
• Elizabeth Montes-Garcés, Department of French, Italian, and Spanish, University of Calgary
• Geoffrey McCafferty, Department of Archaeology, University of Calgary

How have individual and collective identities in Latin America been shaped by the great changes through which the region has gone since the conquest? This interdisciplinary conference seeks to answer this question through an examination of popular and elite perceptions and self-perceptions and the ways in which Latin American subjects have been represented in literature. The conquest created new colonial categories and identities (Indio and Español or Português, slave and master) and laid them on top of indigenous and African ethnic and cultural identities. The first accounts of the conquest and the newly-conquered peoples were highly tinted by medieval legends and European and Euro-American authors sought to fit the Americas into-to them-familiar frameworks. By the eighteenth century, European and Euro-American colonists were creating new identities as Americans, and during the independence wars, (proto-)national identities were forged in the crucible of struggle against the mother countries. The creation of nation-states offered Latin American popular classes the opportunity to identify themselves as members of new nations and to demand inclusion in them; these demands, in turn, forced members of the elite to rethink their notion of nation. Essayists and romantic and realist novelists promoted enduring nation-building myths in the nineteenth century.

The subsequent integration of Latin American countries into the international economy and the often unfavorable comparisons drawn between them and Europe or North America led to a broad rethinking of Latin American identities. Twentieth-century writers, artists, and film-makers deeply questioned unequal international relationships and searched for ways to redefine their identities. In the last decades of the twentieth century, members of marginalized groups such as women, indigenous people, and Afro-Latin Americans have questioned previous gender, ethnic, and cultural identities that were assigned to them while the migration of Latin Americans (especially to North America) has created new, transnational identities The late twentieth century has seen a multiplicity of emerging Latin American identities and a new emphasis on identity politics in many parts of the region No single discipline can grasp all of these issues and this conference welcomes papers from any discipline that address questions of present and past Latin American identities. We invite proposals for papers on these issues from both graduate students and faculty. Please send proposal (100-word abstract), brief CV, and full contact information by October 15, 2003, to: