Luisela
Alvaray
Gilberto Blasini
Elise Bartosik-Vélez
Jerome Branche
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
Álvaro
Félix Bolaños
Kerry T. Hegarty
Susan McFarlane-Alvarez
Yeidy Rivero
Gustavo Verdesio
Imagi(ni)ng
Indigenous Spaces: Self and Other Converge in Latin America
Luisela Alvaray, Univesity of New Mexico
Around the Quincentennial Celebrations of the arrival of Columbus to the
Americas, a few Latin American features became critical examinations of
the official accounts of the so-called Discovery and Conquest. I will
examine to what extent and in what ways Mexican Cabeza de Vaca (Nicolás
Echevarría, 1990) and Venezuelan Jericó (Luis A. Lamata, 1991) are in
dialogue with contemporary challenges to the rationality of the (post)
modern world and, therefore, constitute critiques to the traditional discourse
of history itself. Through the subjective experience of a Spanish individual,
both films attempt to reconstruct the collective experience of transformation
of identity that, more frequently, the native cultures had to undergo
to survive colonization.
11:15 – 1:15 PM, Digital Arts & Entertainment Lab
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Creolizing Filmic Images or Towards a Critical Apprehension of
Caribbean Cinema
Gilberto Blasini, Univeristy of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
The presentation will focus on the way in which ideas related to creolization
(from cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall, Maryse Conde, Antonio Benitez
Rojo, and Korbena Mercer, among others) allows for the constitution, from
a critical perspective, of a definition of Caribbean cinema. This definition
seeks to emphasize the diversity extant in the Caribbean area (which for
the purposes of my research extends beyond the insular Caribbean to include
the southeastern area of the US, the east coast of Mexico and Central
America, as well as the northern rim of South America, all the way down
to Brazil). This diversity is understood through the continuities and
discontinuities that structured the Caribbean following the European colonizing
projects that emerged at the end of the 15th century and that have continued
to plague the region to this day.
2:15 – 4:15, Digital Arts & Entertainment Lab
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Rewriting Empire in Post-Colonial Spanish America
Elise Bartosik-Vélez, Dickinson College
While early nationalists of Spanish America aspired to empire, they articulated
these aspirations in ambiguous ways because of the region's long experience
with colonialism. The figure of Christopher Columbus, long associated
with empire in an interpretive tradition that began with Columbus himself
and was later perpetuated by historiographers and literati before it was
transferred to the AmericasCwas appropriated by Spanish American nationalists
as representative of the imperial spirit of the newly independent nations.
With the name AColombia," nationalists ascribed to the Western narrative
of translatio imperii, invoking the glories of the Roman Empire and of
Western civilization itself. But because Columbus had been the first representative
of the Spanish Empire in the New World and the first colonizer, Spanish
American nationalist discourses about Columbus reveal an oblique relationship
with the past whereby the colonial experience is either effaced or distorted
and Columbus's relationship with the Spanish Empire is redefined. Here
I analyze poetry and speeches about Columbus written in Spanish America
during the nineteenth century, including poems by José Peón y Contreras
y Gabriel Carrasco and a eulogy read in 1803 by José Caballero on the
occasion of the burial of Columbus's supposed ashes in Havana.
2:15 – 4:15, Digital Arts & Entertainment Lab
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From negros to afrodescendientes: Race-making in Latin American
Society and Culture
Jerome Branche, University of Pittsburgh
This paper offers an analytical retrospective of the insertion of captive
Africans and Afrocreoles into New World Hispanic colonies, their position
in the racialized colonial regimen, and the legacy of their racialized
domination. It suggests that current Apost-dictatorial" tendencies toward
pluriculturalism and multiethnicity in Latin America, and a gathering
consensus regarding the identitarian concept of the afrodescendiente,
promises to arrest the inherited culture and taxonomies of caste, the
generalized myth of Aracial democracy," and make room for the quality
of political agency that is impossible without the epistemic rupture with
the colonial vocabulary and its racialized points of view.
2:15 – 4:15, Digital Arts & Entertainment Lab
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Prefiguration and Fulfillment: Biblical Readings of Colonization
in the Atlantic World
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, University of Texas - Austin
Symposium Keynote Speaker and World History Annual Lecturer
This talk explores a traditional reading technique of the Bible, namely,
typology, as it was applied to the interpretation of colonization and
nature in the New World.
4:30 - 6:00 PM, Troy Moore Hall
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Until these people switch to our language or all of us to theirs...
Early Hispanism's Urgency and the Homogenization
of Indigenous Cultural Diversity
Álvaro Félix Bolaños, University of Florida
Hispanism is homogenizing cultural strategy rooted in fear and a crucial
aspect of a Spanish program of migration and colonization in the New World.
In the early process of Spanish penetration and colonial stabilization,
the uncontrolled and overwhelming Native cultural difference was an obstacle
to such Spanish program. These cultural differences were thought by Spanish
and criollo leaders and intellectuals as the source of future rebellions
against Spanish rule. Such fear was critical in the excruciatingly detailed
policies put in place for a drastic alteration of the Native cultures
and their forced insertion into a Hispano-centric culture that included
Castilian language, Christian proselytism, and the imposition of the Spanish
daily way of life. Cultural homogenization was subsequently critical for
the construction of a sort of a brutal contact zone. This paper intends
to examine early practices of Hispanism and reflect on the ideological
burden of those practices in the Hispanism exercised in our academic institutions
today. The primary texts to be studied include official reports and legal
documents regarding the 15th- and 16th-century exploration and organization
of the nascent Spanish colonies.
This paper, therefore, intends to contribute to the
ongoing discussion that is taking place today among scholars interested
in Spanish and Latin American literatures and cultures on the nature of
Hispanism. It is a contribution made from three interrelated vantage points:
(1) from that of a practitioner of Hispanic studies inside the U.S. higher
education system, which in the context of contemporary U.S. contacts with
different cultures John Beverley has characterized as an "information
retrieval apparatus" (1999, 2);1 (2) from a space to write this reflection,
which is provided by an institutional setting that recognizes the growing
importance of the Spanish language and Hispanic cultures to the U.S. economic,
political and cultural interests, and requires us to provide students
with Athe intellectual and communicative tools necessary to live and work
effectively" in a world in which Spanish is spoken (either inside or outside
the country);2 and (3) from a condition of participation in that Apersistent
inflow of Hispanic immigrants," which, according to Samuel Huntington's
unreasonable, divisive and xenophobic view, Athreatens to divide the United
States in two peoples, two cultures and two languages" (2004, 1).3
A reflection from these vantage points requires,
therefore, taking into account that Hispanism is not only an ideology
but also an intellectual and political practice linked to: (1) a pervasive
imperial culture brought to the New World by the Crown of Castile and
by its Spanish immigration experience, and (2) to the strategies of developed
countries to position themselves advantageously in a global economy, such
as the current Spanish government >s efforts to promote Castilian language
and Spanish culture throughout the world (and particularly Latin America)
as way to advance Spain's cultural, social and economic interests.
11:15 – 1:15 PM, Digital Arts & Entertainment Lab
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The Recasting of Colonialist Tropes in the Mexican "Ranchera" Comedy
Kerry T. Hegarty, University of Miami
This talk explores the politics of representation of the Mexican film
genre of the "comedia ranchera", popular from the 1930s through the 1950s.
Specifically, it looks at how the genre employs an idealized vision of
Porfirian Mexican in order to construct a sense of national identity during
the post-Revolutionary era. It argues that Aranchera" films, by reversing
traditional colonial power dynamics through the construction of such archetypes
as the charro and the mujer pura, attempt to heal the wounds of a colonial
past, and re-cast agrarian-based social relations in a positive light,
in line with the populist politics of post-Revolutionary Mexico. It traces
the development of the genre within its socio-political context from its
inception- with Alla en el rancho grande (1936, de Fuentes),
to its decline with Medias de seda (1955, Morayta).
9:00 AM – 11:00 PM ,Digital Arts & Entertainment Lab
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Democracy, Distribution and Digital Propoganda Revolution and
the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign
Susan McFarlane-Alvarez, Georgia State University
In 2004, Venezuela Solidarity Campaign (VSC), a group based in Britain,
began selling DVD copies of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, a feature
length documentary about the role of the media in the 2002 attempted coup
against President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. On their Website, VSC promoted
this documentary as “the single biggest tool to disprove the lies of the
opposition and demonstrates peoples resistance to fascism” and “One of
the significant weapons in the struggle to build solidarity” (Campaign
2006). On the other side of this struggle, Opposition leaders claimed
that the documentary’s bias resulted from the producers’ location within
the Chavez administration at the time of the coup.
In September 2004, after VSC began distribution of
the Revolution DVD, Power Pictures advised VSC that they were in violation
of Power Pictures’ distribution rights and that they should stop selling
the DVD. After waiting for Power Pictures to follow up on its promise
to begin distributing the DVD, VSC joined other voices in accusing Power
Pictures of blocking the film’s distribution, a tactic which many claimed
mirrored other international attempts to secure the boycott of this film
(Sanchez 2003).
This paper considers the struggle for control of the
discourses that circulate through the text and distribution of Revolution
and VSC’s use of the documentary as a weapon of solidarity. Using postcolonial
theory and applying literature on Thirdness, I position VSC as struggling
with a core difficulty that postcolonial theory itself faces: the negotiation
of national identity in the global ecumene necessarily defined through,
yet attempting to escape, external intervention (Bhabha 1990; Bhabha 1990;
Anderson 1991; Shohat 1992; Bhabha 1994; Hall 1996).
9:00 AM – 11:00 PM, Digital Arts & Entertainment Lab
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Cubanidad in Preproduction: The Imaginings and Beginnings of Cuban
Commercial Television
Yeidy Rivero, University of Indiana
Drawing from stories published in the Cuban newspaper Diario de la Marina,
the magazines Carteles, Bohemia, and Gente, and The New York Times, in
this paper I examine the beginnings of television in Cuba paying particular
attention to the ways in which radio/television critics and television
owners defined the medium in relation to discourses of Cuban modernity.
The main argument guiding this research is that through television, questions
about Cuban modernity entailed issues of technology, class, race, gender,
morality, sexuality, and geography, as well as the nation’s relationship
to the US and to other Latin American countries. In a period that witnessed
the incorporation and development of television, the discussions of creating
a national network, the emergence of five commercial stations, and an
exponential increase in imported television sets, the nation-state shifted
from a democracy to a dictatorship (by way of Fulgencio Batista’s March
10, 1952 military coup). Within this technological and political context,
critics and television owners provided varied understandings of the role
of the new medium. These distinct and sometimes conflicting interpretations
of ‘television’ reveal Cubans’ “creative adaptations” regarding the medium
as an emblem of the nation’s alternative modernization.
9:00 AM – 11:00 PM, Digital Arts & Entertainment Lab
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Indigenous Discoveries: Two Fictional Accounts of the Discovery
of Europe Before Columbus
Gustavo Verdesio, University of Michagan
In this paper, I analize the fictional accounts of the discovery of Europe
by indigenous explorers as imagined by Federico Andahazi (El conquistador,
2006) and Alejandro Paternain (Crónica del descubrimiento, 1981). These
novels show very different ideological assumptions, and discursive strategies.
I will discuss the use of humor by Paternain as opposed to Andahazi's
solemn tone, the different choices these authors made regarding the social
organization of the indigenous groups that perform the deeds that lead
to the discovery of Europe (the former chooses to present the readers
with a society of hunter-gatherers and navigators, while the latter focuses
on the Mexica or Aztecs, a society organized around a State), as well
as the intention that both authors share to use this fictional encounter
as a means to criticize Western society and modernity at large. There
is also an important difference between these authors vis-à-vis their
strategies for the representation of the cultural traits of the discoverers:
while Andahazi's take is based on some colonial texts that describe Aztec
life, Paternain chooses to make everything up about the Amerindians, the
Mitones, a fictional ethnic group, who discover Europe in his novel. A
comparison of these authors different choices as well as their similarities
will allow us to see how some images of the Amerindians created by European
chroniclers of colonial times still have currency in the present.
11:15 – 1:15 PM, Digital Arts & Entertainment Lab
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