Program

FRIDAY, April 11^th

9:30 AM   

                  

Doors and Coffee

10 AM     

                  

Opening Remarks -  Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco

(Chair, Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Columbia)

10:30 AM – 12 PM    

Cultural Practices in Francoist Spain, ‘50s-‘70s

Moderator:
Almudena Marin-Cobos (Columbia)

Presenters: 
Pablo Garcia-Martinez (CUNY) 
Javier Fernández Galeano (Brown)
Magdalena Romero-Córdoba (CUNY)

This panel will focus on several cultural practices in Francoist Spain during the ‘50s-‘70s. Pablo García Martínez (CUNY) will examine the editorial activity of Galicia’s cultural field in regards to the intellectual figure Ramón Piñeiro, paying particular attention to the different ways he places himself within that field according to his theory or praxis. Javier Fernández Galeano (Brown) will also examine the editorial activity in the peninsula under the regime during the ‘60s but working from an opposing point of view, suggesting that censorship played a fundamental role in the ideological construction of the regime; a case in point is the translation and appropriation of Steven Marcus' book, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England. Last but not least, Magdalena Romero Córdoba (CUNY) will explore how during the ‘70s, the "asociaciones de vecinos" depicted themselves as places where everyday life practices could be redefined. From various points of view, these papers will study both those alternative daily practices that were born within the margins of dictatorial regime and the ideological machine of that repressive system itself, facilitating a mapping of the cultural practices of the last decades of the Franco dictatorship.

12 PM – 1:30 PM      

On the Confines of Critical Discourse

Moderator:  
Santiago Acosta (Columbia)

Presenters:
Marta Garcia (University of Louisville)

Victor Batalhone (Princeton)

Xiaoxi Zhang (University of Minnesota)

This panel questions the epistemological and methodological limits of the critical discourses that determine our common views about a variety of theoretical categories. The discussion will cover a wide range of periods and subjects, from the production of the Other in travel narratives of the early modern period, to the construction of identity in Brazilian 19th and early 20th century historiography, to the relations between ecomysticism and Liberation Theology in 20th century Central American poetry. Our first panelist, Vitor Claret Batalhone Júnior (Princeton University), will discuss the work of historian João Capistrano de Abreu, focusing on the discursive practices used in his writings to naturalize a particular reading of Brazilian identity. Marta Rosalía García (University of Louisville) will present an ecocritical analysis of Ernesto Cardenal’s Canto cósmico in an attempt to update and revive the study of this work by the prominent Nicaraguan poet and Roman Catholic priest. Finally, Xiaoxi Zhang (University of Minnesota) will question the common assumptions of postcolonial studies about alterity through an analysis of the ways in which the image of the Other is produced in Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios and Fernão Mendes Pinto’s Peregrinação.

1:30 PM – 3 PM          

LUNCH

3 PM – 5 PM            

Theory and the Early Modern Archive Roundtable

Guests

Gayatri Spivak (Columbia)

Alessandra Russo (Columbia)

Participants

Daniel Da Silva (Columbia)

Nicole Hughes (Columbia)

Rachel Stein (Columbia)

Moderator

Ibai Atutxa (Columbia)

This roundtable will explore the relationship between archive and theory and the ways in which archives challenge and expand theoretical discourses.  The graduates will introduce an aspect of their research or a short work related to this topic and Professors Spivak and Russo will then respond to and engage with the presented work while also relating larger questions of theory and archive to their own work. Daniel da Silva presents a reading of Portuguese Manuelino architecture that reveals its liminal qualities, complicates theories of globalization and engages with the concept of connected histories.  Nicole T. Hughes argues that mestizo practices and spaces of theater in the long sixteenth century represented and thereby situated Iberian geopolitical events in the Americas and, at the same time, inscribed new societies into European history. Rachel Stein turns to books on the New World printed in early seventeenth-century Lisbon to investigate the functioning of the printing press in the global expansion of the Spanish-Portuguese Union of Crowns, proposing a method of reading as the deployment of networks in order to rethink the workings of early modern composite monarchies and Iberian globalization.

5: 30 PM – 7 PM       

Reception

SATURDAY, April 12^th

9:30 AM                      

Doors and Coffee

10 AM – 11:30 AM    

Approaching Theory through the Politics of Space

Moderator:
Marta Ferrer (Columbia)

Presenters:
Javier Suarez (Harvard)

Arno Argueta (University of Texas Austin)

Vicente Rubio (SUNY Stony Brook)

The following panel challenges current epistemological notions such as colonialism, phallogocentrism and the transmission of knowledge. The presenters will establish different dialogues with their objects of study as a way to delve into collective identities and their particular articulations of self-reflexive politics. Javier Suarez (Harvard University) suggests the study of three social structures—agora, shabbat and aylla—as a way to understand the Latin American collective and specifically the colonial (and non-colonial) subject. Arno Argueta (University of Texas at Austin) dives into the identities of gender within two short films from Muestrario de Cine Maya in an attempt to challenge conventional gender dichotomies and to approach the active politics of visual material through a new “queered audiotopic space”. In our last paper, Vicente Rubio (Stony Brook University, SUNY) works toward a redefinition of the social Spanish movements created by Fundación de los Comunes (2012). The paper grapples with the movements’ transmission of alternative knowledge and therefore with the particular tensions between them and academia. The coevality of the foregoing issues will create an interesting pool of debate in order to renegotiate theoretical dichotomies through three different spatial visions taken from philosophy, gender and sociology, respectively. The panel will address the cultural articulation of the politics of space as a key for self-reflection within Iberian and Latin American cultures.

11:30 AM – 1:30 PM   

Queer Public Lives in Latin America 

Moderator:  Gabriel Giorgi (New York University)

Participants:

Marcelo Carosi (NYU)

Jonathan Gómez (NYU)

Cristel Jusino Díaz (NYU)

Francisco Marguch (NYU)

Danielle Roper (NYU)

This roundtable will explore queer theories and studies that address temporality, affect, the commons, and/or institutional life (the university and the public humanities).  Each of the graduate students will speak for about 7-10 minutes in either English or Spanish with Gabriel Giorgi moderating.

1:30 PM – 3 PM           

LUNCH

3 PM – 4:30 PM          

Re-writing the cultural space in Latin America:

Interruptions of other/emerging cultural productions

Moderator:   
Daniella Wurst (Columbia)

Presenters:   
Gina Malegold (University of Wisconsin Madison)

Juan Leal Ugalde (University of Michigan)

Valeria Rey de Castro (University of Texas Austin)

This panel seeks to explore the different ways in which Latin American cultural productions interrogate and destabilize Latin American history, in particular its political space and the role of the State in the construction of the national imaginary in the 20th and 21st centuries. Valeria Rey de Castro (University of Texas at Austin) analyzes how contemporary Argentinian narrative interrogates the heroic exaltation of the desaparecidos of the Guerra Sucia (1976-1983), presenting new ways in which national memory is being (re)constructed and breaking away from an institutionalized narrative. Gina Malagold (University of Wisconsin – Madison) focuses on the cultural figure of “La Plancha” in Uruguay and Argentina and the way in which it constructs an alternative space that challenges the cultural binaries that have long prevailed in Latin American literature and culture. Finally, Juan Leal Ugalde (University of Michigan) explores the relation between the theory of catastrophe of Patricio Marchant and the poetry of Raúl Zurita in order to question the possibilities and limits of the philosophical and literary thought emerging from the particular conditions of political violence during the Chilean dictatorship (1973-1990). All three participants reflect upon the tension between the cultural domination of the Latin American hegemonic discourse and the different possibilities and scopes that these different modes of cultural production can have when interrupting into cultural and political spaces within Latin America.

4:30 PM                      

Keynote Introduction - Diego Azurdia (Columbia)

                                   

4:45 PM – 6 PM          

Keynote Address

Bruno Bosteels (Cornell) 

La eficacia de la teoría

Bruno Bosteels es profesor en el Departamento de Lenguas Románicas de Cornell University. Es el autor de Badiou and Politics (Duke UP, 2011), The Actuality of Communism (Verso, 2011), y Marx and Freud in Latin America: Politics, Psychoanalysis and Religion in Times of Terror (Verso, 2012). En español ha publicado los libros Alain Badiou o el recomienzo del materialismo dialéctico (Palinodia, 2009) y El marxismo en América Latina: Nuevos caminos al comunismo (Vicepresidencia de la República Plurinacional de Bolivia, 2013). En la actualidad está escribiendo dos nuevos libros: Philosophies of Defeat: The Jargon of Finitude y The Mexican Commune. Es también el traductor al inglés de media docena de libros de Alain Badiou, entre ellos Theory of the Subject (Continuum, 2009) y The Adventure of French Philosophy (Verso, 2012).

6 PM – 8 PM               

Closing Reception