Annual Editorial Meeting and Conference
This material is also available in: Español Português
New York University
September 8-9, 2022
RVSP: https://jlacs2022.eventbrite.com
Thursday, September 8
🗓️ 3 pm – 6 pm, Modern Languages and Literatures Building, 13-19 University Place, room 222
» Gabriela Zamorano (El Colegio de Michoacán)
Impossible archives. Damage, fragility and memory in visual archives of Purépecha communities in Michoacán
Talking about archives involves referring to collections of objects and/or documents that have been accumulated, preserved, and organized. Archives are usually available in the present and open to possible future uses. Among the infinite generation of archives, particularly of domestic ones, only a few of them become preserved and public. Building on Derrida’s notion of “archive fever” as the desire for archiving, the potential destruction of the archive, and the power paradoxes of this tension in terms of memory, temporality and patrimony, this presentation tells the stories of some local visual archives in Purépecha communities of Michoacán that either became destroyed, that remain in precarious preserving conditions, or that have been built around a concern for documenting the passing of time and death.
» Naara Fontinele dos Santos (Visiting Fellow, Princeton University)
Retrieving Images, Retrieving Histories: Reimagining an Unresolved Colonial Past
In 1909, photographer Dana Merrill was commissioned by a U.S. Railway Company to document a neocolonial engineering feat in Latin America: the construction of the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad. Merrill’s images showcased this ambitious enterprise intended to expand corporate capitalism in the Western Amazon rainforest, inscribing a promise of modernization in the “land of the rubber-gum tree.” In 2012, almost a century later, I started working with this photographic archive, interrogating the fabrication of colonial representations, the construction of imaginaries and the writings of History. Retrieving these images and the multiple histories embodied within helps recognize their possibilities for inquiring futures. This research process — existing in the intersection of an analysis of archival material and the creation of collaborative pedagogical projects – examines the collections looking particularly at traces of the invisible and the omissions within archiving.
Friday, September 9
🗓️ 9 am – 12 pm, King Juan Carlos Center, 53 Washington Square South, room 404 (CLACS Seminar Room)
» Editorial Board Meeting (Journal editors only)
🗓️ 2 pm – 5 pm, King Juan Carlos Center, 53 Washington Square South, room 404 (CLACS Seminar Room)
» Victoria Cóccaro (Universidad Nacional de las Artes)
Catástrofe y utopía en la ópera experimental
Desde hace tiempo que la ruina ha dejado de ser una parte del pasado para convertirse en la condición del presente. Al desastre ecológico se suman las crisis económicas y el desgarro del tejido social. Vivimos, al parecer, en la catástrofe permanente. ¿Hay un futuro posible desde la ruina? ¿Un mundo posible después de la extinción? A extinção é para sempre es el nombre de un proyecto colectivo que el artista brasileño Nuno Ramos llevó adelante entre mayo del 2021 ymayo del 2022. De sus siete episodios, voy a detenerme en Os desastres da guerra, una ópera experimental en la que el vínculo entre palabra y sonido es una nueva coartada para huir de la hipervisibilidad mediática en la que vivimos. La ópera experimental funciona como una categoría que expande las de performance o instalación sonora, una herramienta, entonces, con la que abordar diversos elementos de Os desastres da guerra: cuadros vivientes que hacen sensible fósiles corporales, partituras que hacen oír la ceguera social y catástrofes sonoras que experimentan su reversibilidad, un mundo posible de imaginación vocálica.
» Sibylle Fischer (New York University)
From a Haitian Standpoint: Essays on Liberty and Equality in the Revolutionary Atlantic
The collection of essays (in progress) I will be discussing in this workshop situates the 18th and 19th century struggles over black slavery and racial equality in the Caribbean and Spanish America within the history of political thought. Based on a wide range of (archival and published) texts, the essays, focussed on Haiti and Venezuela, explore the ways in which we need to revise conventional accounts of the upheavals at the time before we can grasp the struggle against racial subordination as central to the political landscapes.
- Gabriela Zamorano is a professor and researcher at the Center of Anthropological Studies at El Colegio de Michoacán, Mexico. Her work analyses the intersections between political anthropology and visual economies, principally in Mexico and Bolivia. She is the author of Indigenous Media and Political Imaginaries in Contemporary Bolivia (Nebraska, 2017).
- Naara Fontinele dos Santos is an independent scholar and curator. Her forthcoming book, When Cinema Hides and Expands in the Heart of Disorder – The Critical Forces of Brazilian Documentary (1960-1976) is a study of Brazilian non-fictional cinematic forms. Naara is the co-founder and artistic director of BEIRA – Festival de Cinema de Porto Velho, a film festival in the Brazilian Amazon. She has curated numerous film cycles, including “Documentário: Invenção de formas/expressão crítica (1964 -1983)” at the Belo Horizonte International Short Film Festival.
- Victoria Cóccaro is a poet, musician, researcher and translator who teaches at Universidad Nacional de las Artes, Buenos Aires. She has published five volumes of poetry, some of which has been translated into English in Brooklyn Rail. She has played the bass in several bands and ensembles, including Orquesta Atípica Catalinas Sur and El Pony Infinito. Her multimedia piece Decir, in collaboration with composer Francisco del Pino, has featured at the Centro de Experimentación y Creación at Teatro Argentino, La Plata.
- Sibylle Fischer is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. Her book Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Duke 2004) gained multiple awards, among which the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Award, the Modern Language Association’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Award, and the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Frantz Fanon Prize.
