“Otherworldly Archives: Disability and the Paranormal in the Mexican Fin de Siècle” Susan Antebi is Professor of Latin American literature in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Toronto. Her research and writing focus on disability and corporeality, especially in the contexts of contemporary and twentieth-century Mexican cultural production. She is the author of Embodied Archive: Disability in Post-Revolutionary Mexican Cultural Production (U of Michigan Press, 2021), which was awarded the 2021 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities and the 2022 LASA Mexico Section Prize for the Best Book in the Humanities. She is also the author of Carnal Inscriptions: Spanish American Narratives of Corporeal Difference and Disability (Palgrave-Macmillan 2009). Her co-edited volumes include The Matter of Disability: Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect, with David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder (U of Michigan Press, 2019). Her work has been funded by a Social Sciences and the Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant and a Chancellor Jackman Faculty Research Fellowship. Her current research projects center on eugenic legacies in contemporary Mexico and the Americas, and on para-abnormal agency in literature and spectacle.
In her keynote, Dr. Antebi explores the unique function of archival documents or literary texts, which appear to offer themselves to the reader as objects, the embodiment of another world, or as a conduit to that world, one that is out of reach or possibly non-existent. In the moment of archival encounter, bodies and texts affect one another, inscribe each other with meaning, and emerge in relation to multiple objects and worlds within and beyond their immediate horizons. Immersion in this archive is sometimes akin to an otherworldly experience, one that might be cultivated by detailed attention to sensations in the body, to other objects in the room, to the feel and smell of the page, even at the risk of an appropriative, improper reading, or of escapism.
The archive in question assembles textual objects of fin de siècle and early twentieth-century Mexico, in which interest in the occult or paranormal frequently crosses paths with the pathologization of difference, as in the medical diagnosis, treatment, or punishment of hysteria and other conditions. I situate these documents at the nexus of what might be termed the “abnormal” and the “paranormal,” or madness and magic. A reading attuned to both the stigmatization of difference and the creative possibilities afforded by unconventional perceptions of the world allows us to conceive of a hopeful, desired otherwordliness—elsewhere and elsewhen—that is still always anchored in a unique materiality.
