ENGLISH | ESPAÑOL | PORTUGUÊS
Tepoztlán, Morelos, México | July 22 - 29, 2020
Call for participants
2020 Application Form
DEADLINE TO APPLY: JANUARY 15, 2020
In its sixteenth year, the Tepoztlán Institute invites participants to think dynamically about the relationship between the legal and the illegal as it affects bodies in motion throughout the Americas. How have legality and illegality been created, destroyed, instituted, deployed and weaponized against communities, from the colonial period to the present? How has the discourse of legality used notions of objectivity and reason to define the law while at the same time breaking or re-defining the rules of “law” in the interest of the powerful at the expense of those on the margins? In what ways have individual or collective practices subverted or appropriated the law? What alternative laws or customs exist and persist inside of the state and in its shadow? How can intimate to public political responses create different bodily “encounters” that cross rather than confirm boundaries, stage new collective movements, reshape notions of the human, and reinforce forms of living in the face of legalized dehumanization?
The fluid and arbitrary nature of legality and illegality in the Americas is deeply tied to the legacies of conquest, colonialism and slavery. Although the term “encounter” has served to mask violent acts such as the European invasion of territories, and state institutions have created legal shields for similar acts, we define “illicit encounters” as multivalent violent or non-violent processes that can contest normative and legal regimes. The theme of the workshop invites an exploration of the ways in which concrete resistance to or appropriation of the law propel the state and its agents to separate the legal from the illegal. Since the colonial period, acts of legitimate resistance (indigenous and Black uprisings, for instance) have been criminalized by legal apparatuses by representing resistance as outbursts of irrational violence. In spite of these projects, those most affected never cease to question legalistic decisions and to find ways around them through what have been, and are often still, deemed “illicit” encounters between and among bodies/communities and military apparatuses, religions, or geographical delineations that question European cultural and political hegemony.
We invite reflections that address the links between the colonial institution of legality and its historical reinvention and redeployment. Questions may include: how have state borders drawn from the colonial period defined certain movement as illegal, and how have legal titles served to further a racial state? Why is it legal to allow thousands of people trying to cross borders to die while alliances that try to help those crossing are designated as illegal? Why is it so difficult to expose the state’s complicity with the murders of Black and indigenous people and with feminicidios in the Americas? How do sexuality and reproductive rights across the hemisphere reflect deep histories of state policing of bodies? Moreover, why are these contemporary deployments of the law often detached from the colonial and neocolonial transnational histories and processes that provoked them?
Contributions may also include questions about the irreducibility of art, music, and other cultural practices to the law (their “alegality”); the relation of the economy to other institutions that determine “legality;” alternative understandings of what is or is not legitimate; and the formation of alliances that question these very dichotomies. Scholars and activists may address any historical period, and approaches may draw on race and ethnic studies, gender studies, feminist perspectives, Marxist studies, poststructural theory, etc. Particularly relevant would be participation that seeks to understand the relationship between legality and the reinvigoration of the authoritarian right and white supremacy, as well as the strategies that confront these and other crises across the continent. We are also interested in essays that take seriously the illicit and emancipatory power of “play” (with words, space, objects, etc.) that is the very form of resistance and politics when faced with weaponized structures of reason and legality.
DEADLINE TO APPLY: JANUARY 15, 2020
In its sixteenth year, the Tepoztlán Institute invites participants to think dynamically about the relationship between the legal and the illegal as it affects bodies in motion throughout the Americas. How have legality and illegality been created, destroyed, instituted, deployed and weaponized against communities, from the colonial period to the present? How has the discourse of legality used notions of objectivity and reason to define the law while at the same time breaking or re-defining the rules of “law” in the interest of the powerful at the expense of those on the margins? In what ways have individual or collective practices subverted or appropriated the law? What alternative laws or customs exist and persist inside of the state and in its shadow? How can intimate to public political responses create different bodily “encounters” that cross rather than confirm boundaries, stage new collective movements, reshape notions of the human, and reinforce forms of living in the face of legalized dehumanization?
The fluid and arbitrary nature of legality and illegality in the Americas is deeply tied to the legacies of conquest, colonialism and slavery. Although the term “encounter” has served to mask violent acts such as the European invasion of territories, and state institutions have created legal shields for similar acts, we define “illicit encounters” as multivalent violent or non-violent processes that can contest normative and legal regimes. The theme of the workshop invites an exploration of the ways in which concrete resistance to or appropriation of the law propel the state and its agents to separate the legal from the illegal. Since the colonial period, acts of legitimate resistance (indigenous and Black uprisings, for instance) have been criminalized by legal apparatuses by representing resistance as outbursts of irrational violence. In spite of these projects, those most affected never cease to question legalistic decisions and to find ways around them through what have been, and are often still, deemed “illicit” encounters between and among bodies/communities and military apparatuses, religions, or geographical delineations that question European cultural and political hegemony.
We invite reflections that address the links between the colonial institution of legality and its historical reinvention and redeployment. Questions may include: how have state borders drawn from the colonial period defined certain movement as illegal, and how have legal titles served to further a racial state? Why is it legal to allow thousands of people trying to cross borders to die while alliances that try to help those crossing are designated as illegal? Why is it so difficult to expose the state’s complicity with the murders of Black and indigenous people and with feminicidios in the Americas? How do sexuality and reproductive rights across the hemisphere reflect deep histories of state policing of bodies? Moreover, why are these contemporary deployments of the law often detached from the colonial and neocolonial transnational histories and processes that provoked them?
Contributions may also include questions about the irreducibility of art, music, and other cultural practices to the law (their “alegality”); the relation of the economy to other institutions that determine “legality;” alternative understandings of what is or is not legitimate; and the formation of alliances that question these very dichotomies. Scholars and activists may address any historical period, and approaches may draw on race and ethnic studies, gender studies, feminist perspectives, Marxist studies, poststructural theory, etc. Particularly relevant would be participation that seeks to understand the relationship between legality and the reinvigoration of the authoritarian right and white supremacy, as well as the strategies that confront these and other crises across the continent. We are also interested in essays that take seriously the illicit and emancipatory power of “play” (with words, space, objects, etc.) that is the very form of resistance and politics when faced with weaponized structures of reason and legality.
Other potential themes include:
● Reflection on “the (il)licit” that challenge the border between legality and illegality
● “Encounters” between people and media, social groups and the state, communities and territories, nature and extractive enterprises, etc.
● The capitalist demand to open some borders even with the forced closures of others (Cuba, Venezuela)
● The formation of “illegal” migration networks (coyotes, safe houses, false residence certificates, official and unofficial centers of support for migrants, etc.)
● International security regimes and their impacts (on the movement of people; on commerce in weapons and drugs; on state borders)
● Alliances among lawyers, institutions, and communities that question or directly subvert legal regimes
● The designation of certain bodies (usually female gendered, non-binary, black, brown and non-white) or ways of being as “illicit”
● The appropriation of and resistance to “the illicit” through acts of subversion, connection, performance, or play
● The weaponization of the illegal and illicit by authoritarianism, as well as authoritarian subversion of the rule of law
● The legality and illegality of sexual and reproductive rights from a transnational feminist perspective
● Surveillance at the borders of the state, including private armies, vigilantism, mercenaries
● Criminalization of social protest, censorship of social media, policing of public spaces
● Legal apparatuses used to create and secure racial states in the Americas (legalized land-grabs; criminalization and carceral regimes; jurisprudence of white supremacy; racialized immigration policy and law)
● The criminalization of the bodies, daily lives, and mobility of Black and indigenous people, and the impunity of white violence
● “Encounters” between people and media, social groups and the state, communities and territories, nature and extractive enterprises, etc.
● The capitalist demand to open some borders even with the forced closures of others (Cuba, Venezuela)
● The formation of “illegal” migration networks (coyotes, safe houses, false residence certificates, official and unofficial centers of support for migrants, etc.)
● International security regimes and their impacts (on the movement of people; on commerce in weapons and drugs; on state borders)
● Alliances among lawyers, institutions, and communities that question or directly subvert legal regimes
● The designation of certain bodies (usually female gendered, non-binary, black, brown and non-white) or ways of being as “illicit”
● The appropriation of and resistance to “the illicit” through acts of subversion, connection, performance, or play
● The weaponization of the illegal and illicit by authoritarianism, as well as authoritarian subversion of the rule of law
● The legality and illegality of sexual and reproductive rights from a transnational feminist perspective
● Surveillance at the borders of the state, including private armies, vigilantism, mercenaries
● Criminalization of social protest, censorship of social media, policing of public spaces
● Legal apparatuses used to create and secure racial states in the Americas (legalized land-grabs; criminalization and carceral regimes; jurisprudence of white supremacy; racialized immigration policy and law)
● The criminalization of the bodies, daily lives, and mobility of Black and indigenous people, and the impunity of white violence