Estudios Culturales en las Américas

The Latin@american Cultural Studies Research Cluster is proud to present two lectures by Dr. Leonor Arfuch, Professor, University of Buenos Aires

A PRESENTATION OF HER BOOK: Memoria y autobiografía: exploraciones en los límites

Wednesday, May 15th, 2:00-3:30 p.m., 912 Sproul (EN ESPAÑOL)

A PRESENTATION: “Trauma and Memory: Surrounding the Unspeakable with Words”

Wednesday, May 15th, 4:30-6:00 p.m., 912 Sproul (IN ENGLISH)

Dr. Leonor Arfuch is Professor at the University of Buenos Aires where she is Director of Research on Cultural Studies at the Gino Germani Research Institute. She works on questions of subjectivity, identities, memory, and narrative in the fields of literature, arts, and the media, taking a multidisciplinary approach that combines discourse analysis, literary critique, semiotics, and aesthetics. She is also the author of several books, including: La entrevista, una invención dialógica (1995, 2nd edition 2010); Diseño y Comunicación. Teorías y enfoques críticos (Co-Author), 1997); El espacio biográfico. Dilemas de la subjetividad contemporánea (2002); Crítica cultural entre política y poética (2008); andMemoria y autobiografía. Exploraciones en los límites (2013). As an editor, she has participated in the compilation of the following collective volumes: Identidades, sujetos y subjetividades (2002); Pensar este tiempo. Espacios, afectos, pertenencias (2005); with G. Catanzaro Pretérito Imperfecto. Lecturas críticas del acontecer (2008); with V. Devalle, Visualidades sin fin. Imagen y diseño en la sociedad global (2009).

This event is generously co-sponsored by the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, The Hemispheric Institute of the Americas, the Graduate Group in Cultural Studies, and the Human Rights Initiative.

Date:          Nov.4, 2010
Time:         4pm
Location:    3201 Hart Hall

Professor Ana Patricia Rodriguez, from the University of Maryland, College Park, will be visiting UC Davis. She is a Latino/a Studies and Central-americanist scholar.  Click here for the flyer.

Her talk is titled “Los 30”: Documenting Thirty Years of the Salvadoran Diaspora, 1980-2010.

This event is sponsored by the Estudios Culturales en las Americas Research Super Cluster, The Davis Humanities Institute, and the Hemispheric Institute of the Americas.

*Wednesday May 19: 12-2pm in 912 Sproul Hall*

Please join us for a lunchtime discussion with Salvador Schavelzon, who is visiting Davis from Brazil.

Salvador works on Latin American cosmopolitics, Indigenous Autonomy and Anthropology of the State. He is writing his PhD thesis in Anthropology on the political process in Bolivia, based on ethnographic research about the Constitutional Assembly and the foundation of the Plurinational State. He graduated from University of Buenos Aires; and is doctorate candidate at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro where he also did his master with a dissertation about the State in Argentina.

*Lunch will be provided*

*This event will be in Spanish*

For more information, please contact Magalí Rabasa (mrabasa@ucdavis.edu)

The Estudios Culturales en las Américas Research Cluster invites you to join us for our Spring 2010 Brown Bag series. Our new Brown Bag Series is intended to foster dialogue among students and faculty and to help our graduate students obtain peer feedback on their work.  We hope you will join us!

Wednesday, April 21 | 1:00pm | Voorhies 228

Isabel Porras

Grad Student, Cultural Studies

Latino cuisine, like other forms of ethnic food marketed via cookbooks and ethnic restaurants, serves up “heritage” and “tradition” for consumption. In this context, food becomes a way of transmitting culture and of spicing up daily meals while transforming the definition of “American”. Ethnic cuisines also act as a site where ethnoracial and national anxieties are mediated and worked out. At what point is Mexican food no longer foreign? Is it ever “American”? How do these imaginations imbue latinidad with pleasure/carnality/excess and simultaneously strip these from whiteness? What are the consequences of whiteness being posited as lack? By discussing Mexican and Nuevo Latino cuisine specifically, I ask how “heritage” is put to work, both by food-seekers as well as by the Latin@s this cuisine supposedly represents? What can the tensions between Nuevo Latino Cuisine and “traditional” Latin American cooking reveal about the relationships between tradition and modernity, authenticity and ethnic legitimacy? How are cultural anxieties about the role of Latinos in the American imaginary negotiated through foodways?

Wednesday, May 5  | 1:00pm | Voorhies 228

Magalí Rabasa

Doctoral Candidate, Cultural Studies

Proposed Dissertation Research: “A Tianguis of Books, or Making Books Public: Collective-Presses & Intellectual-Political Networks in a ‘Continent in Movement'”

I will be discussing my dissertation research which examines how alternative collectively-run presses are producing and circulating books about current politics in Latin America. In the context of the unprecedented political transformations currently shaping the region, often referred to as the “turn to the left,” I examine their organization and publishing practices to understand how they contribute to the formation of a transnational intellectual-political network that extends across the continent. For this multi-sited ethnography, I will be doing research from Sept 2010-Aug 2011 in Mexico City, La Paz, Bogotá, and Buenos Aires.

Wednesday, May 26 | 12:00pm | Social Sciences & Humanities 1271

Karina Zelaya

Doctoral Candidate, Spanish and Portuguese

Through a detailed study of texts that have been written by many renowned salvadoran literati (Francisco Gavidia, Salarrué, Manlio Argueta, among others) and produced between the late 19th and late 20th century, her dissertation reflects upon the strategic use of popular myths in literature, often derived from the indigenous tradition of the region, a critical trait in the development not just of the national literary tradition but also in the nation’s identity. Her discussion this time will focus on preliminary readings or “apuntes” on two of Francisco Gavidia’s texts: “La loba”, a short story from 1875 and Historia Moderna de El Salvador, a history book from 1917).

RE-ACTIVATING INSURGENT LEARNING: interculturality, indigenous autonomy, & grassroots globalization

Date: February 22
Time: 12 noon
Location: 126 Voorhies Hall UCD

A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION WITH:

• Gustavo Esteva, Universidad de la Tierra OAXACA
• Manolo Callahan, Chicana/o Studies UCSB
• Marisol de la Cadena, Anthropology UCD

FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

SPONSORED BY: DHI & Estudios Culturales en las Américas Research Cluster

Re-activating Insurgent Learning Flyer

“Why invent a dystopic future for my movie when I could imitate a dystopic present?”

Main Event:  Please join us for a screening of Sleep Dealer (Spanish with English subtitles) with its director Alex Rivera.  (Get event flyer.)

When:  Monday, February 8, 6:30-9pm

Where: 2205 Haring Hall

Agenda:

• 6:30-6:45: Introduction to Alex Rivera and his presentation of his film, Sleep Dealer
• 6:45-8:15: Screening of Sleep Dealer (in Spanish with English subtitles)
• 8:15-8:45: Post-screening Q&A with Alex Rivera

Follow-on Event: “Developing World Subjectivities and Sensibilities in a New Kind of Sci-Fi Film and Digital Media Art”

• Will include screening of Alex Rivera’s earlier digital media art works and open discussion.

When: Tuesday, February 9, 12-1:30pm

Where: 194 Young Hall

Read more »

Performance in the Andes

Speaker: Zoila Mendoza, professor, Native American Studies, UC Davis
Day: January 28, 2010
Time: 11:00 am
Place: TBA

Join us for a dialogue with Native American Studies Professor Zoila Mendoza. She will be presenting her latest research in Peru.  Cluster members can review the material posted in SmartSite prior to the meeting.

Estudios culturales en las Américas: compromiso, colaboración, transformación

Fecha: lunes-martes-miércoles 26-27-28 de octubre de 2009
Hora: 4:00-7:00PM
Lugar: 126 Voorhies (entrada libre)

En años recientes han tomado mayor relevancia los cuestionamientos realizados desde el campo de los estudios culturales a las diversas disciplinas pertenecientes a las humanidades y ciencias sociales. Además de lo cual, este proyecto intelectual ha establecido, con cierta velocidad, sus propios espacios institucionales, tales como programas de posgrado, series de libros, congresos y coloquios, revistas especializadas, etc. tanto en América Latina como dentro de los campos de estudios latinoamericanos y estudios latinos en los Estados Unidos (igual que en otros lugares: Canadá, Europa, Australia, etc.).  Mas información

Taking Indigenous Politics on its Own Terms Requires an Analysis Beyond “Politics”

Speaker: Marisol de la Cadena, Associate Professor, Anthropology, UC Davis
Date: Thursday, October 22, 2009
Time: 4-6PM
Location: 3201 Hart Hall

Indigenous politics in Latin America has been branded as ‘ethnic politics,’ a quest to make ‘indigenous cultural rights’ prevail. Yet, what if ‘culture’ is insufficient, even an inadequate notion, to conceptualize the challenge that indigenous politics currently represent? Drawing ethnographic inspiration from recent events in the Andes I argue that current indigenous movements propose an ontological pluralization of politics as they conjure sentient entities (mountains, water, and soil-i.e. what we call nature) into the public political arena. Epistemically, this process cancels the nature-culture divide central to modern forms of representation, and exceeds notions of plurality conceived as the opening of politics to the participation of humans marked by gender, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, religious belief–or any other diacritic of human difference.

Co-sponsor: Latin@American Cultural Studies Research Cluster

Trauma as Durational Performance: A Walk Through Villa Grimaldi

Speaker: Diana Taylor,  Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at NYU; Founding Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics
Date:  Thursday, Oct. 8, 2009
Time:  4:00-6:00PM
Location:  126 Voorhies

Villa Grimaldi was a country estate in suburban Santiago that was turned into a covert prison and torture center during the Pinochet dictatorship. The property, mostly leveled, was rescued as something of a museum of memory al fresco in recent years.

This event is cosponsored by: Cultural Studies Graduate Group, Department of Spanish, Department of Theater and Dance, Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory and Hemispheric Institute on the Americas.