Shared Imaginaries and Intellectual Entanglements Across Latin America/the Caribbean and the Middle East/North Africa
Description
This seminar invites proposals that explore the cultural, literary, and intellectual entanglements between Latin America/the Caribbean and the Middle East/North Africa from a comparative perspective. Our aim is to foster dialogue between scholars working across geographies, languages, periods, and disciplines, and to highlight emerging intersections in Latin America/Caribbean–Middle East/North African studies. We seek to center transregional flows—of people, texts, ideas, aesthetics, and political imaginaries—that link these two complex, heterogeneous regions.
We welcome papers that engage with a wide range of themes, including but not limited to:
- Early Modern connections between the regions
- Migration, exile, and diaspora (e.g., Arab migration to Latin America and vice versa)
- Comparative literatures, poetics, and translation across Caribbean languages, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Turkish, and Indigenous languages
- Anti-colonial thought and revolutionary imaginaries
- Postcolonial and decolonial approaches to comparative literature
- Orientalism, Occidentalism, and their critiques
- Religion, secularism, and cultural politics across regions
- The politics and aesthetics of memory, trauma, and representation
By inviting contributions from across periods and disciplines, we hope to foster conversation among the selected panelists, with the goal of shaping an intellectual community that looks beyond national and regional silos. We aim to reserve ample time for discussion between panelists.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Iman Al Kaisy is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Her research examines contemporary Arabic literature, focusing on testimonial writing and Arab intellectual history after 2011. She has taught at UofT and the American University of Beirut, and served as Program Coordinator at AUB’s CASAR. Her work includes a co-authored article in Manhajiyyat and translations published with Cambridge University Press and the Journal of World Literature.
Speaker Bio
Refqa Abu-Remaileh is Associate Professor in Residence at Northwestern University in Qatar. She was the Principal Investigator for the European Research Council funded project PalREAD (2018–2023). She is author of Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature, published by Stanford University Press in 2023.
Speaker Bio
Elvira Blanco is a scholar of Venezuelan and Greater Caribbean culture, particularly interested in folklore and popular religion. She is the Associate Director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University, where she obtained her PhD in Latin American and Iberian Cultures. She is Adjunct Faculty at the Brooklyn Public Library Bard Microcollege and Part-Time Faculty at Parsons School of Design.
Papers
Speaker Bio
I'm a sixth-year PhD candidate in the Comparative Literary Studies program with a home department in Middle East North Africa Studies and a certificate in critical theory at Northwestern University. I'm not sure what else to include here, but I'm very grateful that you both are organizing this panel at the ACLA. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to continue to foster the interest, depth, and community of dialogue of this comparative nexus.
Speaker Bio
Ashley Kerr is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Idaho. Her first book, Sex, Skulls, and Citizens: Gender and Racial Science in Argentina (1850-1910), examined women and 19th century Argentine anthropology and won the Nineteenth Century Studies section of the Latin American Studies Association’s best book award in 2020. Her second book, Vida Zoo-cial (Nov. 2025), analyzes the Buenos Aires Zoo, its animals, and how it shaped Argentine society.
Speaker Bio
Juliana is currently a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. Research interests include cultural exchanges across the Global South; imperialist constructions of otherness and colonial fantasies; transferable racialized aesthetics; and how representation in media affects the socio-economic relationship between dance, sex, and labor. As a performer and art-maker, Juliana has shown work throughout the United States and internationally.
Speaker Bio
Teresita Goyeneche Perezbardi (Cartagena, 1985) is a 4th year PhD student at the Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures Studies at the Graduate Center - CUNY. She is also a journalist who writes for outlets such as El Malpensante Magazine, El Espectador Newspaper, and Mutante. Teresita is the author of Nonfiction book “La personalidad de los pelícanos” (Tusquets, 2022). Her research is focused on media and neoliberal subjectivities.