In recent decades, the filiation narrative has established itself as one of the most significant narrative forms in Latin American literature. Through family ties, incomplete genealogies, traumatic inheritances, and intergenerational memories, numerous texts have interrogated the relationship between subjectivity, history, and transmission. In them, the search for fathers, mothers, grandparents, or ancestors responds not only to an intimate need for identity reconstruction, but is also linked to broader historical processes: dictatorships, exiles, migrations, disappearances, and family silences.
The filiation narrative thus poses a central question about the ways in which the past is transmitted, concealed, or reinvented in the present. Unlike an autobiography centered exclusively on the self, these narratives tend to construct the subject’s identity through an investigation into others: absent family figures, interrupted lineages, fragmentary archives, photographs, letters, testimonies, or material remains. Writing thus becomes a practice of inquiry, but also of mourning, reparation, or confrontation with what could not be said by previous generations.
In the Latin American context, this narrative modality acquires a particular density. It engages in dialogue with traditions such as testimonial literature, autofiction, the chronicle, exile narrative, or writings of mourning. At the same time, it displaces ways of narrating history: it is no longer necessarily a matter of reconstructing grand national or collective narratives, but of examining how historical processes are inscribed in bodies, surnames, domestic silences, family albums, and intimate memories.
Taking these issues as a starting point, this symposium proposes to reflect on the filiation narrative in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American literature. Proposals are invited that address, among others, the following questions: What do we understand by filiation narrative in the Latin American context? How does it relate to autobiography, autofiction, the family novel, testimony, the chronicle, or documentary literature? What role do the archive, photography, letters, or oral testimony play in the construction of these narratives? In what ways do they elaborate the intergenerational transmission of political violence, exile, disappearance, migration, or social exclusion? How do they represent family silences and gaps in memory?
It is also of interest to examine the affective, ethical, and political dimensions of these writings: the forms of mourning, guilt, shame, nostalgia, anger, or reparation; the narrator’s position vis-à-vis their ancestors; and the ethical problems raised by writing about others or turning a family history into literary material.
Both comparative studies and case studies focused on authors, works, national traditions, or transnational corpora are accepted. Proposals examining the filiation narrative in relation to historical memory, family archives, the transmission of trauma, identity politics, and contemporary forms
