Community and Resistance: Reclaiming Knowledge Production

The graduate students of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center (LACS) at the University of Maryland, College Park, invite proposals for our upcoming conference, “Community and Resistance: Reclaiming Knowledge Production.” Our conference seeks to create a horizontal and transdisciplinary space to learn about, consider, and practice ways of producing knowledge that counter and offer alternatives to the kinds of knowledge that depend upon and reproduce that which Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes as “epistemic violence.” In contexts of epistemic violence, dominant actors and structures often invalidate and seek to silence or discredit ways of knowing that emerge from marginalized agents and communities. One example of that is the destruction of Indigenous knowledge by colonial education systems and the imposition of dominant narratives that erase the experiences of marginalized people, leading to their reduced credibility as knowers within the academy. At the same time, the acts of resistance keep emerging to deal with the impositions of power and violence. Such is the case of what Cristina Rivera Garza proposes in The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation, where she states that communal writing is a practice of resistance to necropolitics and contexts where violence has become commonplace. Thus, necrowriting is understood as processes of “[…] eminently dialogical writing, that is; that in which the empire of authorship, as a producer of meaning, has radically shifted from the uniqueness of the author to the function of the reader, who, instead of appropriating the material of the world that is the other, disappropriates it.” 

We are also inspired by Edouard Glissant, who invites us to think about how interdependence, opacity, and cross-cultural influences can be forces of knowledge and resistance. In his book Poetics of Relation (1990), for example, Glissant describes a “latent, open poetics, with a multilingual intention, in tune with all that is possible.” This poetics conceives of the conditions created by coloniality as providing spaces for encounter and openness to multiple cultures and communities. Thus, we do not seek to define community as a shared essence or a closed identity, but rather to think about its capacity to relate to other communities, bodies, and territories. 

Learn More About Our Keynote Speaker: Yuliana Ortiz

Yuliana Ortiz Ruano (Esmeraldas, Ecuador, in 1992) obtained her degree in Literature with a mention in Arts and Writing by the University of the Arts (Ecuador). She has published in poetry Canciones desde el fin del mundo (Libero Editorial, Madrid, 2021) and Cuaderno del imposible retorno a Pangea (Ediciones Libros del Cardo, Valparaíso, 2021 – Recodo Press, Quito, 2021 – Amauta & Yaguar, Buenos Aires, 2022). Selected in the Translator Choice II of the Latin American Literature Festival LATINALE, organized by the Cervantes Institute of Berlin. Fiebre de carnaval (La Navaja Suiza, Madrid), her first novel, won the IESS Primo Romanzo Latinoamericano Award in Italy in 2023.