Revolutions and Heterotopias

The theme of the 2009 conference is Revolutions and Heterotopias. We seek to reexamine revolutions in the Americas, particularly the political imaginaries that both inspired them and that they unleashed. For example, we welcome work on the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979, and the Mexican Revolution of 1910. We also encourage work on less state-centered events, movements, practices, and ideals that have imagined or generated “other” (hetero-) “spaces” (-topias) for culture and politics. 2009 is an especially propitious time to reflect critically on the significance of revolutions and heterotopias because it is an anniversary year for the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions, and the lead-up year to the centennial of Mexico’s Revolution of 1910 and the bicentennial of its independence. The theme of the conference, however, will not be limited to either the twentieth century or to political upheavals. Rather, we hope to spark wide-ranging discussions about revolutions, literal or figurative, that have been and continue to be carried out by historically marginalized subjects – women, indigenous peoples, queers, and migratory and diasporic subjects – and about the ways in which space and place have helped to configure these revolutions, from the national to the transnational and from the public to the private. Finally, the conference seeks to generate dialogues about epistemological and pedagogical revolutions, different ways of “knowing” and administering knowledge (for example, through particular archival practices), and different theoretical concerns in Latin America vis à vis the United States.