Latin American Literary (Re)Mappings, or How to Decolonize the Geographical Imagination

This presentation will review the ways in which Early Modern cartography and Spanish-American texts produced geographical knowledge, and how that knowledge influenced the way both colonizers and colonized peoples across the Americas imagined and related to their territory, its inhabitants, environment and resources. Furthermore, this presentation will explore how certain Latin American historical fictions promote a decolonial revision, or re-mapping, of such geographical imagination by depicting the Americas as a system of sensorial geographies, elaborated with the bodily experiences and othered subjectivities, such as those of women, indigenous peoples, and the African diaspora.