From Story to Tsikbal: The Words and Worlds of Contemporary Maya Ts’íib (Writing?) in Yucatán

Focusing on contemporary literatures written by authors who self-identify as Maya, in this presentation Dr. Worley will consider the relations that Maya writers in Yucatán create between their texts and their communities, their texts and readers, each other, and scholarship produced about their communities. To what extent do they invert the gaze of dominant cultures, and to what extent do they reproduce it? What techniques do they use to get their work into while also subverting the very notions of “writing” and “literature” upon which their status as authors rests? Perhaps most importantly, by encouraging relations that break with current power structures, how do they cultivate a readership that is not so much of the present but of the future, pointing towards the world in which we live while simultaneously shaping a world which is yet to be?