Event Description
In recent decades, an explosion of critical interventions from multiple fields has emphasized the return to the archive as one of the key axes from which central problems of the culture and history of the Americas are thought about, read, and discussed. However, studies on critics and artistic practices have, to different extents, always been anchored in and in conversation with the archive.
This set of presentations sought to reflect on the way in which Latin American studies have positioned themselves around the notion of the archive, not only as a sphere from which to unravel the possible tension between past and present, but also as a space traversed by material dimensions, institutional mandates, and public policy programs. In this sense, it is proposed to generate a methodological and theoretical discussion around the category of archive itself and associated notions or entities, such as inventory, catalog, collection, heritage, museum, and library: what happens with artistic, literary practices and historiographical ones that escape the totalizing and homogenizing logic of the nation-state and writing? What happens to archives when they are intervened and mobilized through art and fiction? The turn towards the archive that dominates the most recent interventions urges us to take it as a starting point for many of the debates currently taking place in the intellectual, artistic, and critical fields throughout the Americas.
Speakers
Karol Alzate is a PhD candidate in the Spanish and Portuguese program at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her MA in Peacebuilding from La Universidad de los Andes in Colombia and completed her undergraduate degree in History and Literature at Harvard University. Prior to starting her PhD, Karol worked for various non-profit and political organizations, including the Colombian Truth Commission. Her work focuses on Black riverine geographies in the Caribbean and Pacific Coasts of Colombia.
Adriana Amante is Professor of 19th-century Argentine Literature at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras and a researcher at the Instituto de Literatura Hispanoamericana of the Universidad de Buenos Aires. She holds a PhD in Literature from UBA. She also teaches at New York University in Buenos Aires, at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, and in the Master’s program in Creative Writing at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero.
Daniela Cadiz Bedini is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Berkeley. Her research centers on hemispheric American literatures, literary exchanges, and anticolonial activism, with a focus on migrations, border crossings, and linguistic exchange. Her book project, tentatively titled Crossing the Americas: Empire, Race, and Translation in the Long Nineteenth Century, examines diverse modes of translation that were harnessed as anti-imperialist work in the Americas during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Alejandra Decker is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Languages & Literatures and a Chancellor's Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research is on 19th century Latin American and Latinx literatures, science, and technology, with a special focus on mining literature and scientific writing in postcolonial Mexico. She has taught Spanish language and literature courses for both heritage speakers and foreign language learners.
Daylet Domínguez is Associate Professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Department of UC Berkeley. She is a scholar of Caribbean and Latin American literature and culture, with special emphasis on travel cultures and costumbrismo; empire, nation and revolution; slavery, race and colonialism, among other topics.
Bernardine Hernández is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of New Mexico. She specializes in transnational feminism and sexual economies of the US-Mexico borderlands, along with American Literary Studies and Empire, border and migration history, Marxist theory, and Chicana/Latina Literature and Sexualities.
Francisco Huichaqueo is a Mapuche visual artist and filmmaker and an academic at the Department of Humanities and Visual Arts of the University of Concepción, Chile. He graduated from the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chile and also has an MA in documentary film from the same university, as well as a specialization in optics from the Escuela de Cine de Cuba.
Gabriel Lesser is a Ph.D. student in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley. His dissertation is about racial satire, caricatures, and nation-building in nineteenth-century Mexico and Brazi
Laura Pensa is an anthropologist and PhD in Spanish at Brown University. Her work focuses on Colonial and Postcolonial Latin America and Indigenous Studies. She is interested in insurgent Indigenous groups of the South American lowlands, cartography, archives, and contemporary Latin American literature.
Rachel Price is Associate Professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Department of Princeton University. She works on Latin American, circum-Atlantic and particularly Cuban literature and culture. Her essays have examined a range of topics, including media, slavery, poetics, environmental humanities, and visual art.
Tiganá Santana is a professor at the Universidade Federal da Bahia. He is a composer, singer, instrumentalist, poet, music producer, artistic director, curator, researcher, teacher and translator. The multi-artist was the first Brazilian composer in the country's phonographic history to compose an album with songs in African languages. He
Elena Schneider is a historian of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic World at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on Cuba and the Caribbean, comparative colonialism and slavery, and the Black Atlantic. Methodologically, she seeks to write history that moves across regional, imperial, and national boundaries, integrating diverse stories normally told separately. She is also committed to the practice of writing history “from below” and the challenging archival work that makes reconstructing the experiences of historically marginalized peoples possible.