We are very happy to announce our seminar series for Lent 2021, which will be entirely virtual. Speakers are:听
Speaker: Professor L煤cia S谩
Date: 27 January
Time: 5pm UK time
Venue:
Title: Cannibalising Cannibalism: The Radical Anti-coloniality of Brazilian contemporary Indigenous art.
This paper will focus on the work of indigenous artists Denilson Baniwa and Jaider Esbell. In a number of works and performances, the indigenous artists Denilson Baniwa and Jaider Esbell have engaged with Brazil鈥檚 most iconic and enduring artistic movement, 1920s 鈥楢ntropofagia鈥� (Cannibalism). It is not the first time that artists have revisited Antropofagia: the 1960s Tropic谩lia movement, for example, which involved visual arts, music and cinema, paid a strong tribute to Antropofagia; and the 1998 international S茫o Paulo Bienal was entirely dedicated to the topic. What is new about this recent development is that for the first time indigenous artists are producing their own art in response to Antropofagia鈥檚 appropriative interpretation of native cannibalism. Using Antropofagia鈥檚 own methods, Baniwa and Esbell have provided us with the most thorough critique of the movement to date - a powerful decolonial or even anti-colonial exposure of Antropofagia's colonialist vocation.
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Professor Rachel Price
Date: 17 February
Time: 5pm UK Time
Venue: Zoom (registration required)
Title: 听Cuban Communication Networks During the Second Slavery
The soundscape of nineteenth-century Cuba would have included scores of languages, many West and West Central African. Papers and images seized by Cuba鈥檚 Military Commission offer tantalizing but incomplete insights into African-derived societies and cosmograms. Court records include transcriptions of words from Bantu and Yoruba. Yet period literature, even when it sought to be 鈥渞ealist鈥�, is strikingly distant from such language, imagery and political imagination. How might we better uncover and analyze nineteenth-century Cuban sounds, languages, forms of communication? These questions animated my ongoing study, which has uncovered ways that communication technologies themselves鈥攆rom telephony to genre to language interpretation鈥攚ere implicated in Cuba鈥檚 slave society during the height of its 鈥渟econd slavery鈥� in the nineteenth century. I will briefly summarize some of these findings before turning to two new case studies that reveal how West Africans enslaved in mid nineteenth-century Cuba used knowledge of evolving Spanish slave law to file freedom suits. In at least two cases the period, incarceration paradoxically provided the means to liberation from bondage.
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Dr Rory O鈥橞ryen
Date: 17 March
Time: 5pm UK Time
Venue: Zoom (registration required)听
Title:听 鈥楪uaca-Hayo: Colombia鈥檚 Magdalena River as Landscape of Terror鈥�.
In this seminar, I look at the iconography of the Magdalena river turned common grave in a selection of texts about the mid-twentieth-century conflicts known as La Violencia in Colombia (~1948-1953).听 I read the phenomenology of violence (with 脡tienne Balibar and Achille Mbembe) in terms of its intrinsic relationship with cruelty, and connect the specific cruelty of river disposal to partisan histories鈥� material-necropolitical 鈥榦ther scene鈥�: the creation of death-worlds in the making of landscapes. I then address how this deathly space poses problems of representation. Since Guzm谩n Campos鈥檚 seminal La Violencia en Colombia (1962), I argue, writers have sought to give voice to the disfigured river corpse, to make it 鈥榮peak鈥� to the mattering of the dead in the violent re-composition of life-worlds. Some such efforts 鈥� notoriously, novels like Balas de la ley (S谩nchez, 1952) and Zarpazo: otra cara de la Violencia (Buitrago Salazar, 1957) 鈥搑eproduce terror鈥檚 necropolitical-material effects in their mediation by forms of colonial mimesis (Taussig). Others, like Jorge Gait谩n Dur谩n and Eduardo Cote Lamus of the Grupo Mito break with these mimetic cycles through poetic 鈥榥ecrolandscapings鈥� (a term I borrow from Jill H. Casid) that trope on decomposing matter as the basis of other common 鈥榖ecomings鈥�. All nonetheless disturb the fixing of death in landscape, and mobilize distinctly mixed affects as they contaminate the orders of mimesis and poiesis, terror and grace.
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*Book Launch: Ingleses no Brasil. Relatos de Viagem, 1526-1608 (Rio de Janeiro: Ch茫o Editora)
Presenters: Dr Vivien Kogut Lessa de S谩 and Dr Sheila Hue (UERJ 鈥� State University of Rio de Janeiro)
Discussants: Dr Luciana Martins (Birkbeck College, University of London) and Professor K. David Jackson (Yale University)
Date: 10 March
Time: 5pm
Venue: Zoom (Registration required)
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About the Speakers:
Professor L煤cia S谩 is the author of Rainforest Literatures: Amazonian Texts and Latin American Culture听 (Minnesota 2004 - translated as Literaturas da Floresta, Eduerj: 2012) and Life in the Megalopolis: Mexico City and S茫o Paulo (Routledge, 2007). Currently professor of Brazilian studies at the University of Manchester, she was previously professor of Brazilian culture at Stanford University and has held visiting positions at the University of S茫o Paulo, the University of Lisbon, New College, San Francisco and Oberlin College. She is currently involved in projects on 鈥楻acism and Anti-racism in Brazil,鈥� focusing on the case of indigenous peoples (with Felipe Milanez Pereira, UFBA, and 鈥楥ultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America鈥� (with Peter wade and Ignacio Aguil贸, Manchester).
Dr Rachel Price works on Latin American, circum-Atlantic and particularly Cuban literature and culture. Her essays have discussed a range of topics, including digital media, slavery, poetics, environmental humanities, and visual art.听The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil and Spain 1868-1968听was published in 2014 by Northwestern University Press.听Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island, was published by Verso Books in 2015. She is currently working on several projects, including intersections between aesthetics and energy, and a book-length study rethinking communication technologies and literature in the nineteenth-century slaveholding Iberian Atlantic. She is currently associate professor at Princeton and has previously taught at Brown University and Stonybrook University, after working at the Social Science Research Council鈥檚 Program on Latin America and Working Group on Cuba, and at the Consejo Regional Ind铆gena del Cauca in Colombia.
Dr Rory O鈥橞ryen听teaches and researches on听modern听Latin American culture at the 海角社区, and has particular research听interests in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Colombian culture and history. He is the author of听Literature, Testimony and Cinema in Contemporary Colombian Culture: Spectres of "La Violencia"听(Woodridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2008),听 and has co-edited听and contributed听to听Latin American Popular Culture: Politics, Media, Affect听(New York: Boydell and Brewer, 2013),听Latin American Cultural Studies: A Reader听(Routledge, 2017). His current research explores the representation of the Magdalena River in Colombian culture between 1850 and the present day. It engages with a range of works, including mid-nineteenth-century regional romances, late nineteenth-century Afro-Colombian poetry, representations of leprosy in early twentieth-century literature, music and silent film, the 鈥榥ovela de la听Violencia鈥� of the 1950s, and late twentieth-century engagements with听苍补谤肠辞迟谤谩蹿颈肠辞. In doing so it uses the river as a conduit into the fragile interplay between nation-formation and global political and economic processes.听
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