Pablo Aguilera Del Castillo will give a talk titled: Yucatec Islands: Mapping Colonial Fantasies and the Struggle for Humanity, at the The 52nd Annual Convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association. His talk will be a part of a broader session on Shifting Landscapes: Maps, Borders, and Nature in Latin American Literature.

This session will build on recent scholarship devoted to the production of space in the humanities and the social sciences. The breadth of this scholarship has led numerous authors to refer to a Spatial Turn in a wide array of academic disciplines (Warf and Arias 2009, Tally 2017). Interest in spatiality has been reinvigorated by the rise of the digital humanities and the possibilities they afford for the visualization of literary spaces. In the field of Latin American literary and cultural studies, however, the study of spatiality has focused almost exclusively on the literary representation of urban spaces. In recent years, interest in the environment has led literary critics to reflect on topics such as violence (Moraña 2002), language and the body (Holmes 2007, Ostrov 2014), and memory (Ruisánchez Serra 2012). Despite the diversity of the academic work devoted to space in Latin American literary studies, the thematic constellation of the spatial turn has yet to account for the relation between the literary production of space and the patterns that govern the circulation of capital in Latin America, i.e. the relation between literary form and the spatialization of capital in the region. This seminar tries to bridge this gap by positioning itself at the intersection of literary analysis and critical geography. Inviting cross-disciplinary approaches to the production of space this seminar seeks to theorize the relation between the spatiality of Latin American literature and the evolution of the capitalist world system. This particular relation is posited as key to understand the connections between the cultural logic of our present moment and the social and political tensions over the uses of space: from forced migration to ecological devastation, from socioeconomic exploitation to the displacement of indigenous populations.