ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

The conquest and colonization of the Americas by the major powers of Europe forced human beings from three continents into permanent contact with their racial others. As Africans, Europeans, and indigenous Americas began to intermingle and intermarry throughout the Americas, colonial authorities tried to create laws to govern which races could and could not mix with one another and rubrics to categorize the children of mixed parentage. The Americas continue to exist as a space where different races both embrace and collide, perhaps more than any other place on earth. This situation begs the question: how do Americans (in the hemispheric sense) react to racial mixture? “Mestizaje, Mestiçagem, and Miscegenation: Mixing with the Other in the Americas” seeks to explore how the idea of racial mixture has been both welcomed and shunned throughout the Americas since the encounter. This seminar allows for synchronic and diachronic analyses of racial mixture within one country/region of the Americas, but it specifically hopes to discuss how the perceptions of racial mixture differ across the nations and cultures of the Americas.

Friday, March 24

Ian McRae, University of Toronto
“Monstrous Entanglements: Miscegenation and the Grotesque in Inter-American Foundational Fictions”
Rex Nielson, Brown University
“Miscegenation and Tradition in Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma”
Charlotte Geniez, University of Connecticut
“Chaos and Harmony, Visions of ‘Métissage’ in Hugo’s Bug Jargal and Carpentier’s El Reino de Este Mundo”
Victor Figueroa, Wayne State University
“Reluctant Rhythms: Luis Palés Matos’s Afro-Caribbean Performance”

Saturday, March 25

Brian Roberts, University of Virginia
“The Marrow of Revolutionary Tradition: Mixed-Colored Men in the Novels of Chesnutt and Johnson”
Emron Esplin, Michigan State University
“Miscegenation vs. Mestizaje: Portrayals of Racial Mixture in Faulkner and Fuentes”
Vanessa Perez, University of California, Davis
“From Puerto Rican Nationalism to ‘Latinidad’: Mixed Race Identity in Julia de Burgos’ Poetry”
John Alba Cutler, University of California, Los Angeles
“Mestizaje and Technological Hybridity in Alfredo Véa’s Gods Go Begging”