Canada has been a site of literary activity by multiple Latin American diasporas going back to at least the 1970s, when writers who arrived as political exiles from Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina began forming literary communities and establishing small presses dedicated to the publication and dissemination of Latinx-Canadian writing. Yet despite this longstanding history, and despite the literary recognition gained by writers such as Carmen Rodríguez, Naín Nomez, Alejandro Saravia, Carmen Aguirre, Margarita Feliciano, and Guillermo Verdecchia, among many others, Latinx-Canadian literature has received scarce  critical attention within Canadian literary studies. Save for the 2007 publication of Hugh Hazelton’s critical anthology Latinocanadá, the field has yet to significantly engage with Latinx literature as a distinct site of cultural production, one that sheds important light on some of the key questions that preoccupy Canadian literary studies, from the politics and poetics of migration and exile, to the role of multilingual expression in Canadian literary production, to the relationship between diaspor and Indigeneity in the Canadian context. Prompted by recent work from novelists such as Silvia Moreno-García, Rebecca Hirsch García, and Marta Bátiz and poets such as Rebecca Salazar and Dora Prieto, and in an effort to redress the absence of Latinx-Canadian literature within Canadian literary studies, this seminar invites papers that consider the past, present, and future of Latinx literary production in Canada. We welcome papers that engage with diverse historical periods and critical approaches; however, we are especially interested in contributions that consider the following questions: 

• How do the roots and routes of Latinx-Canadian literatures expand our understanding of the “elsewheres” ( Kamboureli) of Canadian literature? 
• How might the critical consideration of Latinx-Canadian literatures expand or complicate reigning paradigms in Canadian literary studies, Latinx studies, and/or hemispheric American studies?
• How is multilingual expression mobilized in Latinx-Canadian writing, and to what ends? 
• How does Latinx-Canadian writing wrestle with the historical legacies of mestizaje, blanqueamiento, and other racial formations that underpin normative understandings of Latinidad?
• How is traumatic memory expressed in Latinx-Canadian literature, whether in the work of first or second-generation writers? How do the perspectives offered by Latinx-Canadian writers align with, or differ from, the perspectives offered by their U.S. counterparts?
• Latino/a/e/x: what kinds of politics, gendered and otherwise, are at stake in the naming of Latinx-Canadian literature as a distinct field of cultural production?
• What lessons can Latinx-Canadian literary studies derive from the disciplinary and institutional trajectories of other diasporic literary formations in Canada, including Asian Canadian studies and Black Canadian studies?