events

Ludmer will be hosting two “conversatorios” in Spanish with the graduates of the Departament of Spanish and Portuguese on March 6, 2-3 pm, March 7, 11 am -1 pm at St. Mary’s Hall. These events are open to the public.

Tomando distancia: la literatura como exilio, Enrique del RiscoTomando distancia: la literatura como exilioPor Enrique Del RiscoLuego de haberle dicho a Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia cual iba a ser el tema de mi conferencia casi me arrepentí de inmediato. Evidentemente había escogido un mal tema, y un mal tema es aquel que apenas invita a la discusión, como este, que casi se demuestra por sí mismo desde el título. Y no solo por la larga tradición de exilios que incluye a casi toda la literatura judía, que no es poco, y va de Ovidio a Dante, de Joseph Conrad a Kundera y entre los que pueden encontrarse en el siglo pasado nombres tan ilustres como los de Thomas Mann, Hermann Broch, Witold Gombrowic, Solzhenitsyn, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, Djuna Barnes, Cezlaw Milosz, Nabokov, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Gabriel García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Mario Vargas Llosa y Julio Cortázar. Esta condición que veo como metáfora útil del hecho literario es definida por la Real Academia con una simpleza escalofriante: “Abandono de alguien de su patria, generalmente por motivos políticos”. Prefiero la definición más abarcadora e imprecisa de wikipedia que lo resume como “el estado de encontrarse lejos del lugar natural”. Y la prefiero a la de la academia que limpia, fija y da esplendor porque incluye un momento anterior a la política y las patrias.

(Lea la conferencia completa en: Boca del cangrejo: manglaria: Tomando distancia: la literatura como exilio, Enrique del Risco.)

The Latin American Studies Center is proud to announce our Visiting Scholars for the spring 2012 semester.

Dr. Carlos Pabón of the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, specializes in questions of repression and historical memory.
Dr. Juan Castillo Cocom of the Universidad Intercultural Maya, Quintana Roo, Mexico, specializes in questions of ethnicity and indigenous peoples.

LASC Visiting Scholars will be in residence for between 10 days and two weeks. They will lecture publically and run intensive workshops for graduate students and faculty. Advanced undergraduates may also attend. UMD students may receive credit for attending.
Mark your calendars.

Carlos Pabón
Lecture: “Can the Story Be Told? History, Memory, and Fiction in the Representation of Extreme Violence” Wednesday, February 22nd 5:00pm – 7:00pm, location TBA)
In his lecture, Professor Pabón will discuss the challenges posed by the relationship between History, Memory and Fiction in the Representation of the Holocaust, the Spanish Civil War, the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile and the military dictatorship in Argentina.

Workshop: “History and Memory of Recent Traumatic Pasts (Chile, Argentina, and Spain)” (Friday, February 24th 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm and Saturday, February 25th 9:30 am – 3:30 pm with working lunch)
Professor Pabón’s workshop will focus on the problem of the “subjective turn” in historiography, particularly in the field of the “recent history” of traumatic pasts, focusing on the cases of Chile, Argentina, and Spain. This turn has been expressed in the centrality that the figure of the witness or the victim, testimony and memory have received, after decades of invisibility or marginalization on the part of historical discourse.

Juan Castillo Cocom is the author of various articles on identity and specifically has written on Maya identity politics. He has taught at Florida International University, the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, CINVESTAV, and the Universidad de la Habana, Cuba. In 2003, he was the Yucatán academic seminar leader for the Fulbright Hays Summer Seminar on Indigenous Cultures and Environmental Issues in México and Costa Rica. Since the summer of 2007, he has been the chair of the teaching faculty of the Universidad Intercultural Maya de Quintana Roo.

Lecture: “Ethnoexodus: Strategic forgetfulnesses and flashbacks” (Wednesday, April 4th 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm, location TBA)
Professor Castillo Cocom will discuss the production of knowledge on “the Maya” through different channels, such as popular media, tourism industry and academic discourse. His presentation provides a critique on anthropological knowledge and discourses as these infiltrate the social imagination. It investigates the “Maya” individual’s constant production of, dislocation from, and re-location in temporary points of identity as practical strategies of “ethnoexodus.” The concept of ethnoexodus is a critique of the idea ethnogenesis as a way of understanding “Maya” identity, and identity formation in general, and how it relates to production of ethnos. Ethnoexodus, as a conceptual tool, focuses on how an individual/social actor can “exit” a temporal “point” of identity suture without having necessarily ever been “in” that particular construction of identity.

Workshop: “Ethnoexodus: Maya Yucatec Topographic Ruptures” (Friday, April 6th 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm and Saturday, April 7th 9:30 am – 3:30 pm with a working lunch)
The primary goal of Professor Cocom’s workshop is to think through the conceptual framework that gives rise to ethnoexodus. This will be accomplished by way of considering, in the first part of the course, the case study of Maya Topographic Ruptures. The goal will be to explore how and why the identity politics of being Indian/Indígena and Maya in Yucatan differ from the politics of Indigeneity in Chiapas, and other parts of México, Guatemala and the Americas.

Students interested in receiving course credit should contact Dr. Karin Rosemblatt at karosemb@umd.edu. Students who attend the lecture and workshop and submit a short final paper may receive one credit.

Future of Information Alliance.

A series of exciting events have been planned to mark the launch of the Future of Information Alliance, a campus-wide initiative at the University of Maryland.

Three remarkable guests we call our “Visiting Future-ists” will spend a week on campus brainstorming with students, faculty, administrators, staff and alumni to identify key information challenges that can best be addressed through interdisciplinary collaboration. They are:

• Dan Russell, Google’s “director of user happiness,” who leads efforts to improve the effectiveness of web searching; he was the keynote speaker at our campus-wide Future of Information Forum held last November;
• Mary Czerwinski, who manages the research on human-computer interaction at Microsoft and focuses on information visualization, group awareness and lifelogging;
• Abdur Chowdhury, former chief scientist at Twitter, who has been working toward improving the ability to separate “signal” from “noise” in the explosion of information on the Web.

During the week, there will be four two-hour events at the Colony Ballroom at the Stamp Student Union in which you can participate.

At the kickoff event, the Visiting Future-ists will describe their own work in helping to innovate for the future information environment, and they will discuss what they see as the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. They will also engage the audience in brainstorming aimed at identifying issues that can best be addressed through interdisciplinary research.

The three additional events, each involving the Visiting Future-ists, will focus on various aspects of the future of information:

• Creativity and Culture
• Transparency and Boundaries
• Science in Our Lives

Each of these three themed events will begin with brief presentations by several faculty members. They come from a very broad array of disciplines but share a passion for understanding the role of information in a wide variety of academic, cultural, and personal endeavors. The Visiting Future-ists will serve as discussants, both responding to what they hear from the faculty panelists and offering their own visions for the future of information as it relates to each of these themes. There will be plenty of opportunity, as well, for brainstorming with the attendees.

The Future of Information Alliance intends for all of these events to serve as catalysts for identifying important research questions that might be addressed in a collaborative and transdisciplinary way.

VI Annual Graduate Student Conference on Latin America and the Caribbean
Imagining Culture, Past and Present

Thursday November 3 and Friday November 4
McKeldin Library

Special Events Room (6137)

Sponsored by the Latin American Studies Center

Featuring a Keynote Address by
Olivia Cadaval of the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage

Recent scholarship on Latin America has provided fresh takes on culture. Questioning monolithic views of the concept, scholars are asking how people imagine themselves simultaneously in relation to local, national, transnational, and global worlds.  They are also rethinking forms of analysis that separate culture from economics and politics. They are looking, for instance, at the role of culture in economic and political practices and institutions; at consumption as a site where economics and culture intersect; at the role of political and economic practices in shaping creativity and the arts. Other scholars are rethinking culture itself as an analytical concept and its relation to categories such as gender, race, class, and ethnicity. This conference seeks to further interdisciplinary conversation on the theme of culture, from the pre-colonial period to the present day.

Conference Schedule

9:00-9:15
Karin Rosemblatt, Professor of History and LASC Director
Welcome Address

9:30-11:00
Creating Knowledge, Transforming Culture
Comment: Professor Judith Freidenberg, Dept. of Anthropology

Sarah Walsh, UMCP, “El Culto de la Verdad: The Relationship between Catholicism  and Science in Early 20th Century Chile”

Rodrigo Magalhães, FIOCRUZ– Brazil, UMCP, “For a Hemisphere United and Free of Disease:
International Cooperation in Health in the Pages of the Boletín de la Oficina Sanitaria Panamericana

Margarita Farjardo,  Princeton, “ECLA is not all about Structuralism: The Political Economy of Economic
Knowledge in Latin America”

11:15-12:45
Popular Culture in the Transnational Imagination
Comment: Juan Carlos Quintero-Herencia, Prof. and Chair, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese

María José Navia, Georgetown University, “Ramificaciones de una identidad pop-moderna en The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”

Marcelo Boccato Kuyumjian, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, “Conciliating Tradition and Modernity: Elis Regina Group and the Transformations of Samba”

Adam Fenner , American University, “Paradise Wasted: US Perceptions of Honduras Before 1933”

Reyna Esquivel-King , NYU, “Día de los Muertos: Race and Gender in From Dusk Till Dawn”

2:00-3:30
Remembering the Past, Shaping the Present: Research on Cultural Memory
Comment: Eyda Merediz, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese

Enrique Rivera, UMCP,  “Silencing through Official Memory: UNESCO and the 1795 Coro Rebellion”

Yuridia Ramirez, Duke University, “Disguised Dissent?: The Memorialization of El Pípila in Postrevolutionary Guanajuato”

Robert Nathan, UNC Chapel Hill, “Yes, We Make Patriots”: Education, Memory, and Narratives of Nation in the Early Cuban Republic

Keynote Address 4:00pm
Olivia Cadaval, Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage
“Encountering Imagined Culture”

Friday, Nov. 4

9:30-11:00
Looking at Visual Culture
Comment: Abigail McEwen, Professor of Art History

Corinna Zeltsman, Duke University, “Reprinted Revolution: The Prints of José Guadalupe Posada and the Creation of a Revolutionary Mexican Aesthetic,  1925-1930”

Daniel  Richter, UMCP, “I Am a Photographer: Horacio Coppola and the Politics of Transnational Modernity in the 1930s and 2000s”

Marcio Siwi, New York University “U.S. – Brazil Cold War Relations and the Making of Modern Art Museums in São Paulo”

Linette Manrique, “Un Juan cualquiera: The Discourse of Mestizaje in a Mexican Telenovela (Corazón Salvaje)

11:15-12:45
Cultural Struggles and the Everyday
Comment: Talía Guzmán-González, Professor of Portuguese

Reid Gustafson, UMCP,“Pulque, Pederasts, and Paper Boys: Masculinity and the Culture of Working-Class Youths in Mexico City, 1917-1929”

Paola Reyes, Duke University, “Strategies of Resistance: Indigenous Opposition to Federal Rural Schools in Chiapas, 1934-1940”

Julia Eichstedt, Johns Hopkins University, “Lispector and Eltit: the Paradox of Self-Writing in the Hour of the Star and Mano de obra”

2-3:30
Spaces for Negotiating Culture
Comment: Daryle Williams, Professor of History

Heidi Krajewski , Tulane University, “Transnational Interactions in the U.S.-Nicaragua Solidarity Movement:A Case Study of the Nuevo Instituto de Centroamerica”

Raelene Wyse, NYU, “Making Spaces for Jewishness with Argentine and Chilean Cinema”

Julia Tomasini Maciel, UMCP, “Literatura y traducción en Internet: Proyecto web Brasil. Papeles sueltos.”

Closing Remarks: 3:30-3:45

A Lecture by
Dr. Marysa Navarro
Charles Collis Professor Emerita of History, Dartmouth College and
Resident Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American
Studies, Harvard University and
Dr. Ana Lau Jaiven
Research Professor, Department of Politics and Culture,
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Xochimilco

Monday, October 30, 2011
3:30 – 5:30 PM
FSK 2120
(Merrill Room)

Dr. Ricardo Padrón holds a PhD in Romance Languages from Harvard University. He is currently Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at the University of Virginia. He is interested in the literature and culture of the early modern Hispanic world, particularly in the various expressions of the Hispanic imperial imagination. His first book, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature and Empire in Early Modern Spain, was published in 2004 by the University of Chicago Press. His current work focuses on Spanish interest in Pacific and Asia in the wake of the Encounter with the Americas in relation to the emergence of globalism during the early modern period. He has also published on the poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega, Fernando de Herrera, and Luis de Góngora, as well as on the mapping of imaginary worlds throughout the modern period.

Students in Prof. Harrison’s seminar “Guaman Poma” are reading “Tracking Space,” a chapter from Ricardo Padrón’s The Spacious Word. For a PDF, send a request to reglee@umd.edu.

The U.S. Latina/o Studies Program, the American Studies Department, and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese would like to invite you to join us for Dr. Michelle Habell-Pallán’s talk titled: “‘American Sabor-U.S. Latinos Shaping Popular Music’: The Possibilities of Public/Digital Humanities Post-911?” on Monday, October 17, 5:30 – 7:00 pm at 1102 Francis Scott Key Hall (the Dean’s Conference Room). Dr. Habell-Pallán is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is the author of Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture and co-editor of Latino/a Popular Culture, both published by New York University Press. She is one of the guest curators of the exhibit “American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music” at the Smithsonian Institution and traveling across the United States.

We hope to see you at the talk. For more information, please see the attached flyer.