Call for papers: v.17, Special issue (2026)
LANGUAGE, BELONGING, AND SUBJECTIVITY IN CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURES IN TRANSIT
Organizers
Profa. Dra. Lívia Santos de Souza – Federal University for Latin American Integration (UNILA)
Prof. Me. Gabriel Lemos Roa – PhD Candidate at the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS)
Prof. Dr. Andre Rezende Benatti – State University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UEMS) / CNPq
Dossier Description
In recent decades, contemporary Latin American literature has produced a significant body of narratives shaped by territorial displacement, migratory experiences, linguistic transition, and the redefinition of identity. In particular, the works of Latin American women writers based in the United States foreground complex forms of negotiation involving language, memory, the body, belonging, and subjectivity, articulating border experiences that challenge fixed categories of nationality, identity, and representation. This dossier seeks to bring together research dedicated to the multiple forms of subjective constitution in contemporary Latin American literature produced in contexts of migration, diaspora, exile, displacement, and borderlands. We are especially interested in reflecting on how literary language operates as a space for symbolic elaboration, the reinscription of identity, and cultural negotiation, generating tensions between mother tongue and dominant language, belonging and exclusion, memory and trauma, visibility and erasure. The dossier welcomes discussions emerging from recent research on contemporary writers such as Yesika Salgado, Myriam Gurba, and Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, among others, whose works explore experiences of cultural displacement, performative identity, symbolic violence, multilingual subjectivities, and colonial legacies. Its scope also includes studies on contemporary Latin American authors writing in Spanish, Portuguese, English, Portuñol, Spanglish, or other hybrid linguistic forms, as well as literary works informed by diasporic and transnational experiences.
Themes:
- Contemporary Latin American literature and migration
- Border writing and subjectivities in transit
- Language, memory, and belonging
- Trauma, displacement, and identity in contemporary literature
- Queer literature and writing by Latin American women
- Slam poetry, spoken word, and performative literature
- Autofiction, autobiography, and testimony
- Literature, the body, and symbolic violence
- Comparative literature and transnational experiences
- Hybrid narratives, coloniality, and subjectivity
- Contemporary Central American literature
- Poetics of belonging and wandering
Deadline: September 30th, 2026.
