Reading the Archive of the Unexpected: Aspiration, Violence, and the Labor of Development in the Narratives on Reading in Latin America.(ACLA 2025)

In Latin America, the convergence of financial crises, developmental and neoliberal policies, informal economies, and armed conflicts has created a backdrop of profound socio-political change spamming over fifty years. This seminar will examine how the region's cultural production reflects these sweeping changes, specifically focusing on the narratives that engage with welfare policies, reading campaigns, and labor regulation within developmental and neoliberal frameworks.

This seminar will center on narratives that reveal the complex interplay between state-driven reading promotion and welfare programs, humanitarian aid, and the growing informal labor market that characterizes the global South’s development history. We will welcome abstracts that explore how the historical struggle for inclusion in the region reconfigures and reinterprets the figure of the lettered subject and the assumptions about illiteracy as a grammar to understand the territories. One of the primary objectives of the seminar is to question the proposal and creation of the independent and informal reading promoter, a figure born from the nexus of state intervention and neoliberal entrepreneurialism, and how this became to represent the emerging cultural subject in Latin America’s neoliberal age. We welcome paper abstracts on Twentieth century and contemporary culture and literature, and we invite scholars from whose work would contribute to this exploration of the intersection between reading, labor, economic development and neoliberalism in the global South.

The seminar will investigate how these narratives mirror and critique the ideological shift toward individualism and privatization in welfare and cultural policies, particularly in relation to education and cultural production. By studying works that address these themes, the seminar aims to unpack how economic restructuring and adjustment created a landscape where reading and literacy promotion commented on and problematized both social mobility, developmental and neoliberal governance. We hope to bring together a diverse range of projects on different temporal and spatial dimensions that would bring a transnational and comparative scope to the discussion.