Description:

During this talk, Prof. S.B. West will consider the 1864 novel Los misterios de Chan Santa Cruz from the vantagepoint of Hortense Spillers “Female Flesh Ungendered,” that is, that race and enslavement produce an a priori exclusion from cisgender grammars. In their reading, they consider the structural function of gender through a framework they call aspirational cisness that confronts the habitus of various characters in the novel as they contend with literary representations of a race war occurring in the Yucatán peninsula during the time of the novel’s publication. This conflict, known as the Caste War, drastically changed social and political landscapes during its 50+ year duration, making it the longest—and arguably most successful—Indigenous uprising of the Western hemisphere. This presentation focuses on two components of Trebarra’s novel: the construction of space in Chan Santa Cruz (the rebel Maya nation recognized as a de facto sovereign state by England in the late 1850s) and gendered character allegories that imagine a disappearing of the Indigenous Maya within liberal ontologies and subjectivities. Ultimately, as they demonstrate in the full-length version of this chapter in their forthcoming book, On Autonomy and Abolition in Yucatán’s ‘Caste War,’ they contend that Caste War textualities destabilized race by pursuing, abandoning, and reconstituting what was perceived as a far more stable identificatory lens—that of gender.