Speaker Series Archives - Latin American, Caribbean, & U.S. Latinx Studies (LACUSL)

LACUSL Speaker Series: Queer Exposures: Roberto Bolaño, Sexuality, and Photography

Mon, 15 Nov 2021 22:11:42 +0000

Please join us for the second LACUSL Speakers Series of the 2021-2022 academic year.

The 2021-2022 LACUSL��Speakers��Series Presents:

“Queer Exposures: Roberto Bolaño, Sexuality, and Photography”

Dr. Ryan Long, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland

Tuesday, November 16th, 3:30 p.m.
Via Zoom.��.

Queer sexuality and photography disturb linear temporalities such as normative social development and the subordination of the past to the present. Close readings of selected novels, short stories, and poems by Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003), demonstrate that queerness and photography also disturb linear conceptions of an author’s trajectory. The political context that influenced Bolaño’s career underscores the significance of these and other temporal disturbances. Especially salient are the defeat of militant leftism, writ large in Bolaño’s work as the “Revolution,” and the ascendency of neoliberalism. My presentation exposes Bolaño’s texts to one another by emphasizing queer characters and photographic imagery, including ekphrases of actual and invented photographs. I propose that this methodology of exposure establishes temporalities within and among Bolaño’s texts that suggest a persistently critical simultaneity, a sense of time and place that refuses teleological domestication.

Sponsored by the Latin American, Caribbean, & US Latinx Studies Major

About our Speaker Series

The��LACUSL Speaker Series��brings together scholars, professionals, and students working in Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latinx Studies to discuss research, teaching, culture, current events, and other topics of interest to students, faculty, staff, and community members. The Speaker Series is interdisciplinary, and draws on the expertise of faculty and graduate students in the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and the professional schools. All events are free and open to the public.

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LACUSL Speaker Series: Sacrificing the Goat in Mario Vargas Llosa’s La fiesta del Chivo

Wed, 06 Oct 2021 18:47:36 +0000

Please join us for the first LACUSL Speakers Series of the 2021-2022 academic year.

The 2021-2022 LACUSL��Speakers��Series Presents:

“Sacrificing the Goat in Mario Vargas Llosa’s La fiesta del Chivo”

Dr. Christopher Schulenburg, Professor of Spanish at UW-Platteville

Tuesday, October 12th, 3:30 p.m.
Via Zoom.��.

Symbolic control over the Americas, spelled-out in the Monroe Doctrine of 1825, exacts its ethical price throughout history. While announcing the end of European hegemony west of the Atlantic, this declaration also suggested that the United States enjoyed the prerogative to intervene in this hemisphere as a means of promoting its own political and economic interests. Although democracy would seem to represent the lofty ideal motivating this influence, twentieth-century dictatorships often replaced these ambitions with brute force. Moreover, as exemplified by the CIA-supported overthrow of leftist President Arbenz in Guatemala and the infamous failure to depose Cuba’s President Castro at the Bay of Pigs, the 1950’s and 60’s underscored a heightened sense of urgency to maintain “friendly” regimes around the Caribbean. The case of the Dominican Republic, led for more than three decades (1930-61) by its dictator, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, clearly illustrates this uneasy coexistence between the support for North American order and its surrender of democratic ethics. Thus, despite Trujillo’s anti-communist stance, his increasingly brazen human rights violations ultimately encouraged a U.S. supported assassination carried out by a group of Dominican actors. Throughout Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel��La fiesta del Chivo��(2000), three related plot lines both illuminate this atmosphere of fear and narrate the violent end of Trujillo. In the end, this dictator’s routine crimes encourage his citizens to organize a purging of Trujillo from the Dominican Republic altogether. From a hemispheric and island perspective, Vargas Llosa volunteers this assassination as a means of “sacrificing the Goat” (al Chivo) to substitute public power for the haphazard violence employed to further this seemingly unending dictatorship.

Sponsored by the Latin American, Caribbean, & US Latinx Studies Major

About our Speaker Series

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LACUSL Speaker Series: “Living ‘A Part Apart’: Brazilian Migrants in Toronto, Canada”

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 19:45:49 +0000

The 2020-2021��LACUSL��Speakers��Series Presents:

“Living ‘A Part Apart’: Brazilian Migrants in Toronto, Canada”

Falina Enriquez, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Monday, March 8, 2021 @ 2:00pm CST
Via Zoom,

Based on a preliminary ethnographic study, this presentation will provide a semiotic analysis of how Brazilian migrants are situated—and situate themselves—within the multiethnic landscape of Toronto, Canada. Although Toronto is a global city and Brazilian migrants are settling there in increasing numbers, Brazilian people and culture, as well as Brazilian Portuguese, appear in limited ways in the city’s public spaces. In part, this seeming invisibility is due to the fact that Brazilians have not mobilized in ways that make them visible to the Canadian multicultural state and because they are caught between Latinidad and Portugueseness, two identities that are more politically and economically powerful in Toronto. Through drawing from Antonio Tosta’s (2004) argument that Brazilian identity is “a part apart” from Latinidad, this talk will examine what Brazilians’ liminality looks and sounds like in Toronto, while also exploring its socioeconomic and political effects.

Sponsored by the Center for Global Health Equity and the Latin American, Caribbean, & US Latinx Studies Major

About our Speaker Series

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LACUSL Speaker Series: “Madness as a Space of Ontological Resistance in Latinx Women’s Writing”

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 19:49:05 +0000

The 2020-2021��LACUSL��Speakers��Series��Presents:

Madness as a Space of Ontological Resistance in Latinx Women’s Writing

Dr. Pilar Melero, Professor, Languages and Literatures, Race and Ethnic Studies, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

Monday, February 15, 2021 @ 3:30pm CST

via Zoom,

Literary critics, anthropologists and others have identified madness as a space of resistance in women’s writing (The Mad Woman in the Attic, Los cautiverios de las mujeres: madresposas, monjas, presas, putas y locas.) Proposing madness as a space of fluidity (Elizabeth Grosz) and as an interstitial space a lo Homi K. Bhabha, I examine la locura as an ontological space of resistance in the work of three Latinx writers: Estela Portillo Trambley, Judith Ortiz Coffer, and Ana Castillo.

Sponsored by the Latin American, Caribbean, and US Latinx Studies Major

About our Speaker Series
The��LACUSL Speaker Series��brings together scholars, professionals, and students working in Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latinx Studies to discuss research, teaching, culture, current events, and other topics of interest to students, faculty, staff, and community members. The Speaker Series is interdisciplinary, and draws on the expertise of faculty and graduate students in the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and the professional schools. All events are free and open to the public.

The post LACUSL Speaker Series: “Madness as a Space of Ontological Resistance in Latinx Women’s Writing” appeared first on Latin American, Caribbean, & U.S. Latinx Studies (LACUSL).

LACUSL Speaker Series: “STATE AND BLACK MOVEMENTS IN BRAZIL: (1980-2010) COOPERATION, CONTESTATION, OR AUTONOMY?”

Thu, 19 Dec 2019 19:54:56 +0000

Thursday, January 30, 2020, 3:00-4:30pm

American Geographical Society Library (AGSL), Golda Meir Library (3rd Floor)

Dr. Fernanda Barros dos Santos, Associate Professor, Suely Souza de Almeida Center for Public Policy on Human Rights, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

“STATE AND BLACK MOVEMENTS IN BRAZIL:��(1980-2010)��COOPERATION, CONTESTATION, OR AUTONOMY?”

This presentation focuses on the heterogeneity and dynamics of black militants, as well as the rhetoric used by presidents José Sarney (1985-1990), Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003) and Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (2003- 2010) concerning the racial issue. Furthermore, it aims to analyze the main racial cut-off institutions created under the initiative of the Executive Power, namely the Palmares Cultural Foundation in 1988, and the Secretary for Policies for the Promotion of Racial Equality (Seppir) in 2003.

Free and open to the public
For more information, contact Sarah Davies-Córdova (cordovas@uwm.edu) and César Ferreira (cferr@uwm.edu)

About our Speaker Series

The LACUSL Speaker Series��brings together scholars, professionals, and students working in Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latinx Studies to discuss research, teaching, culture, current events, and other topics of interest to students, faculty, staff, and community members. The Speaker Series is interdisciplinary, and draws on the expertise of faculty and graduate students in the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and the professional schools. All events are free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the major in Latin American, Caribbean and U.S. Latin@ Studies, the AGSL, and the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies

The post LACUSL Speaker Series: “STATE AND BLACK MOVEMENTS IN BRAZIL: (1980-2010) COOPERATION, CONTESTATION, OR AUTONOMY?” appeared first on Latin American, Caribbean, & U.S. Latinx Studies (LACUSL).

LACUSL Speaker Series: “Negotiating Latinidad: Intralatina/o Lives in Chicago”

Mon, 04 Nov 2019 22:52:26 +0000

“Negotiating Latinidad: Intralatina/o Lives in Chicago”

Professor Frances R. Aparicio,��AMUW Chair in Humanistic Studies, Marquette University; Professor Emerita, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Northwestern University

&��Lulu Sanchez,��LAUCSL and English Major, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Tuesday, November 12, 2019

12:00-2:00pm, AGSL, Golda Meir Library (3rd Floor)

This presentation examines the ways in which Intralatina/os, who embody two or more Latin American ethnicities, negotiate between their different national communities within their family lives and growing up in Chicago. Focusing on the intimacies of nuclear families, personal traumas, exclusions through race and language, and analyzing practices of passing,t eh book argues for the ways in which Intralatinx struggle to belong within highly=-segmented social spaces within Latino USA. Frances R. Aparicio will also be in conversation with Lulu Sanchez, who is both Mexican and Guatemalan, about the challenges of Intralatina/o subjects as they struggle to belong to multiple national communities within Latino USA.

About our Speaker Series
The��LACUSL Speaker Series brings together scholars, professionals, and students working in Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latinx Studies to discuss research, teaching, culture, current events, and other topics of interest to students, faculty, staff, and community members. The Speaker Series is interdisciplinary, and draws on the expertise of faculty and graduate students in the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and the professional schools. All events are free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the Latin American, Caribbean, and US Latin@ Studies Major

& the AGSL

The post LACUSL Speaker Series: “Negotiating Latinidad: Intralatina/o Lives in Chicago” appeared first on Latin American, Caribbean, & U.S. Latinx Studies (LACUSL).

LACUSL Speaker Series: “Communication Technologies and Political Polarization in Latin America”

Thu, 03 Oct 2019 21:56:50 +0000

Tuesday, October 1, 2019
3:00-4:30pm, AGSL, Golda Meir Library (3rd Floor)
Professor Hernando Rojas
“Communication Technologies and Political Polarization in Latin America”

Free and open to the public
For more information, contact Sarah Davies-Córdova (cordovas@uwm.edu) and César Ferreira (cferr@uwm.edu)

About our Speaker Series

Sponsored by the major in Latin American, Caribbean and U.S. Latin@ Studies and the AGSL

The post LACUSL Speaker Series: “Communication Technologies and Political Polarization in Latin America” appeared first on Latin American, Caribbean, & U.S. Latinx Studies (LACUSL).

LACUSL Speaker Series: “The Novels of Lucrecia Zappi: A Reading and Conversation”

Tue, 26 Mar 2019 22:24:53 +0000

Monday, April 1, 2019
2:00pm, AGSL, Golda Meir Library (3rd Floor)
Lucrecia Zappi (Brazilian Author and Journalist)
“The Novels of Lucrecia Zappi: A Reading and Conversation”

Free and open to the public
For more information, contact César Ferreira (cferr@uwm.edu) and Sarah Davies-Córdova (cordovas@uwm.edu)

About our Speaker Series

This year’s LACUSL Speaker Series honors Professor Howard Handelman’s (51�� professor 1970-2006) lifelong contributions to learning and promoting the study of Latin America and the Caribbean.

The LACUSL Speaker Series��brings together scholars, professionals, and students working in Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latinx Studies to discuss research, teaching, culture, current events, and other topics of interest to students, faculty, staff, and community members. The Speaker Series is interdisciplinary, and draws on the expertise of faculty and graduate students in the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and the professional schools. All events are free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the major in Latin American, Caribbean and U.S. Latin@ Studies

The post LACUSL Speaker Series: “The Novels of Lucrecia Zappi: A Reading and Conversation” appeared first on Latin American, Caribbean, & U.S. Latinx Studies (LACUSL).

LACUSL Speaker Series: “Peruvian Colonial Spanish: Spanish and Indigenous Narrative Strategies”

Tue, 26 Feb 2019 21:41:57 +0000

Wednesday, March 6, 2019
2:30pm, AGSL, 51�� Libraries, 3rd floor
Dr. Anna María Escobar, Spanish and Portuguese, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“Peruvian Colonial Spanish: Spanish and Indigenous Narrative Strategies”

Colonial documents of the Viceroyalty of Peru include writings where the author presents herself as an Indigenous individual. Historians of the colonial period have long cast doubt on whether these documents were really written by individuals of Indigenous origin, since only the Indigenous elite had access to formal education. Nonetheless, many documents can be found in the Peruvian Archives (Archivo General de la Nación, Archivo Arzobispal de Lima, Archivo Regional de Ayacucho), and other, that identify the ‘writer’ as being of Indigenous origin. I focus in this presentation on a selection of legal complaints, ‘authored’ by Indigenous individuals from the early 17th century, that I have collected.

The qualitative and quantitative linguistic analyses focus on personal narrations and commentaries found in 18 legal complaints. Using methodologies from Narrative Analysis (cf. Labov & Waletsky 1968) and Critical Discourse Analysis (cf. Van Leeuwen 2007, 2008), three types of Indigenous documents emerge. Further semantic analyses reveal a set of distinct narrative patterns that distinguish these documents from those written by Spaniards, and highlight one particular subset of the Indigenous documents as being the most likely to have been authored by an Indigenous individual. The narrative patterns include pragmatic meanings found in Andean languages, under the grammatical conceptual category known as evidentiality. This category, defined as the ‘marking of source of information’ from the perspective of the speaker (Chafe & Nichols 1986; Willett 1988; Aikhenvald 2004), is found in Andean languages (Hardman 1986; Weber 1986; Faller 2002, 2007), including Quechua, the main Indigenous language of the region. The Indigenous documents display differences in narrative strategies, in the understanding of what is ‘true’, and in signaling a subaltern social stance. I argue that these distinct narrative patterns display a colonial Andean speaker’s point of view that, in turn, point to an Indigenous author.

Free and open to the public
For more information, contact César Ferreira (cferr@uwm.edu) and Sarah Davies-Córdova (cordovas@uwm.edu)

About our Speaker Series

This year’s LACUSL Speaker Series honors Professor Howard Handelman’s (51�� professor 1970-2006) lifelong contributions to learning and promoting the study of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Sponsored by the major in Latin American, Caribbean and U.S. Latin@ Studies

The post LACUSL Speaker Series: “Peruvian Colonial Spanish: Spanish and Indigenous Narrative Strategies” appeared first on Latin American, Caribbean, & U.S. Latinx Studies (LACUSL).

LACUSL Speaker Series: “The Contemporary Latin American Novel: Psychoanalysis and Violence”

Sun, 10 Feb 2019 16:55:11 +0000

Wednesday, February 20, 2019
3:20 pm, AGSL, Golda Meir Library (3rd floor)
Dr. Beatriz Botero (Comparative Literature and Folklore Studies, UW-Madison)
“The Contemporary Latin American Novel: Psychoanalysis and Violence”

Professor Beatriz L. Botero (Ph D. University of Wisconsin- Madison; Ph D. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) is a specialist in contemporary Latin American literature and cultural studies. Her research is oriented primarily towards topics in narrative and psychoanalysis, with special emphasis on identity, body and social conflict. She has also worked these topics in relation to contemporary visual art.��She received a Summa Cum Laude for her dissertation in Psychoanalytic Foundations and Theory Development at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. In her publications, Botero examines the relation between national identity and personal identity in novels such as Gabriel García Márquez’s last novel��Memoria de mis putas tristes. In her most recent work (El Yo ideal y el Ideal del yo en Cobro de Sangre de Mario Mendoza, 2015), Botero contributed to a special issue on Psychoanalysis and Ibero American literature for the journal��Studi Ispanici, examining issues of personal and social identity. In the book��she examines literature from a wide range of countries including��Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Puerto Rico.

Free and open to the public
For more information, contact César Ferreira (cferr@uwm.edu) and Sarah Davies-Córdova (cordovas@uwm.edu)

About our Speaker Series

This year’s LACUSL Speaker Series honors Professor Howard Handelman’s (51�� professor 1970-2006) lifelong contributions to learning and promoting the study of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Sponsored by the major in Latin American, Caribbean and U.S. Latin@ Studies

The post LACUSL Speaker Series: “The Contemporary Latin American Novel: Psychoanalysis and Violence” appeared first on Latin American, Caribbean, & U.S. Latinx Studies (LACUSL).