The resurgence of far-right movements in North, Central and South America has precipitated an urgent need to understand the contemporary landscape and historical development of reactionary cultures across the hemisphere. Works by Finchelstein, Toscano, Caldeira Neto, Pereira Gonçalves and others provide a solid foundation for thinking about the transatlantic formation of Latin American fascisms and their persistence in the present. Scholars including Cowan, Seguín, Garrard-Burnett and Kirkpatrick have further mapped the participation of Latin American intellectuals, politicians, religious leaders and geographies in shaping the Cold War-era ingredients of what are often called the “new” rights today. Within literary and cultural studies, Loy (“reactionary genealogies” and “the global alt-write”), Saferstein and Goldentul (“the young readers of the Argentine Right”), Birkenmaier (“Oswald Spengler’s Latin America”), de Castro and Birns (on Vargas Llosa’s political thought) and Dewulf, Lynch and Paganelli (on the Nietzscheian influences and cultural conservatism of Gilberto Freyre) are crucial for understanding how cultural production, specifically, has operated as a vehicle through which Latin American intellectuals assimilate, translate, critique and influence right-wing formations that exceed their own national borders and those of the region. Further examples can be found in a recent special issue of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies; substantial bibliographies on Miguel Serrano, José Vasconcelos, Octavio Paz and Nicolás Gómez Dávila; and recent studies of how Latin American literary works prefigured the rise of “new” rights (e.g. Hoyos on Bolaño and the “alt-right”).  

This seminar seeks papers that consider Latin American cultural production in relation to world fascisms and reactionary, conservative and neoliberal ideological formations. Participants are invited to trouble the category of “the right” in contexts where its boundaries are less than clear or in relation to thinkers who evade classification on the left-right spectrum. Papers may consider any field of cultural production, including film, television, literary writings, periodicals, music and new media. Contributions that make hemispheric and transatlantic connections are encouraged. We especially welcome papers that place the region in conversation with South Asia, Africa, the Asian Pacific or the Middle East.

Possible topics may include: right-wing countercultures, culture wars and infrastructures of cultural production (think tanks, publishers, production companies, streaming platforms); genealogies of reactionary thought; right-wing critiques of fascism; representations of reactionary rebellions (Cristero War,  Canudos); the cultural landscape of “religious rights” in the region; fascist/reactionary forms, affects and aesthetics; reactionary modernisms and technofascisms; and works that critically prefigure or respond to the rise of the far right in the present.