Perhaps more than any other period of Iberian literary history, the texts and contexts of colonial Latin America have always called for interdisciplinary work. Given this natural tendency, our field has a history of justifying “literary” scholarship in terms of specific objects, methods and knowledge. The restructuring of the MLA divisions, an obvious reaction to long-standing changes in the discipline as a whole, can prompt us to return to the question of “literary studies” in light of larger changes within the field. This roundtable brings together scholars with diverse trajectories, all of whom who have worked between and among disciplines related to literature (anthropology, intellectual history, history of science) and most of whom are involved in long-standing interdisciplinary projects. Some of them have migrated from one discipline to another in their own professional experiences. We would like to hear from them about these experiences, the possibilities and pitfalls of combining disciplines, thinking specifically of the future of the field of colonial Latin American studies in Departments of Literature. Have we rounded a corner after the upheaval of the field, including the questioning of the very term “literature” as applied to the colonial period, from the 1980s onward? Would it be possible to imagine, or even more so, fruitful to work towards a separate interdisciplinary field for colonial Latin American studies, outside of the current disciplinary structure? If the field of Latin American literature (and indeed, the related disciplines of anthropology, history and art history) is itself changing, is colonial Latin American studies moving in the same direction? What are the consequences of interdisciplinary work on the coherence and functioning of departments? Is there a way that literature, literary studies or cultural studies can still delineate a specific area of study in a meaningful way? If not, what might replace these terms?

The Division of Colonial Latin American Literatures will host a roundtable at the 2014 MLA Convention in Chicago. This blog was created to supplement the roundtable and we welcome comments, whether you will be attending or not. Below we have included the program information and following that an extended description of the topic for comment.

796. A New Discipline? Multidisciplinarity and Latin American Colonial Literatures

Speakers: Galen Brokaw, Univ. at Buffalo, State Univ. of New York; Ivonne del Valle, Univ. of California, Berkeley; Kristin Huffine, Northern Illinois Univ.; Gonzalo Lamana, Univ. of Pittsburgh; Yolanda M. Martínez–San Miguel, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick; Nicolás Wey-Gómez, California Inst. of Tech.