West, Américas, Other Wests: Conversations across Western American and Latin American Studies

In the Spring of 2011, and with the support of the Américas Research Center and the Dean of Humanities, I am hosting “The American West/Américas Seminar.” 

The topic of the seminar represents new research directions for my ongoing work on the culture and literature of the American West.  The seminar brings together prominent Western Studies scholars from the U.S. and England with distinguished Latin Americanist faculty here at Rice to discuss how we might conceptualize region and notions of belonging/place in light of a broad theoretical turn away from nation-state based and temporal analyses toward questions of space, the transnational, and the global. This reconceptualization in Western Studies has been underway seriously for over a decade, but of the important work which globalizes the local West, little of it has investigated linkages between West/Américas even while conceptual apparatuses exist (as obvious example, border theory) that might develop them.  Nor have Latin Americanist faculty often crossed north into “the West” as scholarly terrain, in spite of interests in questions of new regional/national identities in contexts of globalization and neoliberalism, issues of displacement and nomadism, work on border and third spaces in cinema, or work on  violence, ethics, and gender. If Latin Americanists cross north into “West” to study, for example, narconarrative or labor, what emergent geographies (Other Wests) might usefully complicate the axis of North/South?  What Other Wests map the Global South?