Imagining Latinidades: Articulations of National Belonging
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abstract
Given the recent jolting shifts in discourse and public policy, the place of Latina/o/x people in the United States has never been more uncertain. No one can accurately predict the future, but we will be much better situated to understand the impact of change on the Latina/o/x community due to the work of this Seminar. By incorporating the scholarly work and personal insights of individuals in the humanities and interpretive social sciences, we will develop a far more nuanced understanding of how Latina/o/x peoples see themselves and how others see them. First, we’re interested in exploring the ways in which Latina/o/x people disrupt dominant and dominating articulations of nation/nationhood/belonging. Second, we’re interested in how articulations of national belonging (particularly those that exclude Latina/o/x folks) puncture the social fabric in problematic ways. We are interested especially in the ways in which different technologies implicate and are implicated in imagining and disrupting Latinidades (the shifting senses and articulations of Latina-ness/Latino-ness/Latinx-ness)—that is, how technologies (which might be discursive, electronic, or otherwise material) form new ways of belonging to and resisting citizenship, nation, Latinidad, and more. The Seminar will move through geopolitical spaces and histories. We will begin with global questions about sovereignty and the locations of thought across the long sixteenth century. We then proceed through a set of national questions anchored in debates over civic and social identities, immigration, constructions of U.S. Latinidades, representations of culture and community, languages, and more, while still remaining cognizant of ever-shifting hemispheric connections across the Americas. Next, we dwell within and across domestic regions by exploring affirming, self-questioning, fluid, and negative articulations of Latinidades in the Midwest and elsewhere, which inevitably reconnect with national, hemispheric, and global in differing and differential ways. As the Seminar moves toward its conclusion, we will broaden back out to encompass networked and speculative spaces, asking how we might animate potentialities of Latinidades despite skepticism toward the nation and practices of belonging that have been years in the making.
