The historical and global phenomenon of the Latin American Boom has anchored scholars in the Cold War period when institutions like Casa de las Américas in Havana, Cuba, played a crucial role in the circulation of literature from Spanish America (Weiss 2015). Since its temporal anchorage in the second half of the 20th Century, letters from figures like José Donoso and José Lezama Lima have become archived within institutions and/or made into documentary films. This access to information has revealed secret lived realities that are reshaping how scholars engage with a transnational literary movement and the unique positionalities writers had as they intellectualized themselves into local and global imaginaries. In addition, the immersion of the 1960s Boom into the literary market has elicited a number of tensions. For example, the question of the Boom’s dominant place in the global literary canon as partial representative; its “cosmopolitan desires” (Siskind 2014) of sought after but never fully-achieved universality; and its absorption into a world literature from above (Hoyos 2015) continue to constitute nodes of unfinished negotiation for Latin American critical and creative writers.

Looking before, during, and after, this seminar aims to curate presentations that put pre- and post-Boom literatures in dialogue with canonical conceptions of the movement. In addition to expanding its temporal signification, this seminar is interested in presentations that expand its archive (female authors, open and not LGBT writers), and geographies that are often left outside of the purview of the Latin (e.g., Haiti, Brazil), and literary and media forms that are adjacent to the prose literary canon (poetry, cinema, photojournalism). The session also welcomes proposals on more recent but yet to be canonized literary booms such as the 21st-century literature of the “unusual” (Russel 2022) exemplified by the global circulation of authors such as Samantha Schweblin, Fernanda Melchor, Mónica Ojeda, Fernanda Trías, and Mariana Henriquez.

In revisiting the Latin American Booms, this seminar seeks presentations that (1) contextualize the genealogy with 19^th- and early 20^th-century movements; (2) re-engage the canon with cultural producers who were left out of the traditional boom; and (3) dialogue the various 20^th- and early 21^st-century booms. The intellectual labor and discursive engagements of this seminar aims to build a hemispheric consciousness that recognizes the globality of Latinidades and the significance of its circulation across time.