Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Margarita Saona
Lecture Title: "Plain Things and Space: Metonymy and Aura in Memorials of Social Trauma".
The last couple of decades have seen an increased preoccupation with memory and a question that has been often raised is how does a community remember a traumatic event. In Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma Jeffrey C. Alexander suggests that the elaboration of social trauma requires the reconstruction of tragic events into a narrative. Doing so allows a collectivity to define moral responsibility and redirect political action. This reconstruction depends upon a “carrier group” to articulate those events, to give them meaning in the public sphere. This carrier groups makes aesthetic choices regarding the representation of the facts and their articulation into a narrative of trauma.
In this presentation I want to look at public memorials of cultural trauma and observe how, beyond oral and written narratives, they manifest aesthetic options that allow a collectivity to reconstruct their own story. This talk will explore the different ways in which we commemorate and why are some aesthetic choices particularly successful in promoting a mourning process at the social level. How can a sculpture, or a photo exhibit, or a train car, or a collection of clips, make me think, or understand, or feel emotion about something that happened years ago? Are there linguistic operations involved in these experiences? In what sense are these emotional experiences, cognitive experiences? Looking at a variety of images of memorials of social trauma, I will discuss the possibility that language, cognition and emotion work together in these cultural productions to promote empathy in the viewers and, thus, facilitate social mourning.
Sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studie
A Symposium - October 9, 2008
Main Conference - Haldeman 041 (9 am-1 pm)
Workshop - Haldeman 125 (3 pm- 5pm) Workshop
Free and open to the public.
Dartmouth College will host a one-day symposium on the role the humanities play in the project of democracy. Two Spanish intellectuals, former UNESCO Ambassador José María Ridao and Professor Juan Aranzadi, have been invited to debate with interested faculty, students, and the wider Dartmouth community on this topic. Two local scholars, Professor Donald Pease and Dickey Fellow Paddy Woodworth will provide introductory remarks and respond to the lectures.
Ridao and Aranzadi are public intellectuals in Spain and yet the scope of their academic and political interests far exceeds the Spanish context: the role that memory plays in processes of civil reconciliation (Spanish, Israeli, Palestinian examples); the messianic politics behind projects of national and cultural identity (the resurgence of extreme right-wing political movements in Europe and the US); new configurations of identity within the context of globalization (immigration as more than a tourism of cultural diversity); or the place of the micro-nationalist element in Europe's re-configuration of its older national borders into of a federation of regions, an unsettling development that challenges the character and the political appeal of the nation-state.
For Aranzadi and Ridao, culture is a space of resistance and of discomfort, a site to challenge and question, a politics of liberation, a move towards democracy. How do the humanities and their specific ways of creating knowledge contribute to this project? Is it possible to divorce the arts from the political? Why is it important to map this intersection? How do the arts push public discourse into uncharted arenas? What pedagogies of peace and of civil growth do these conversations foster?
Cultures of Democracy - A conference organized by Annabel Martín, Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Cosponsored by the Leslie Center for the Humanities, Dickey Center for International Understanding, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, The Nelson A. Rockefeller Center, the Office of the Provost at Dartmouth, and the Dean of the Faculty. This conference is also in support of the Dartmouth Centers Forum theme, Conflict and Reconciliation.
Thursday, May 8, 2008 at 4 p.m.
Dartmouth Hall room 212
Gaye Theresa Johnson is Assistant Professor of Black Studies and an affiliated faculty member in the Departments of History and Chicana/o Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Dr. Johnson’s areas of expertise are twentieth century U.S. history; race and racism; social movements and identities, and cultural history with an emphasis on music. Her publications on comparative politics and music appear in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicana/o Studies, the Journal of the American Studies Association of Texas, the National Women’s Studies Association Journal, the Comparative American Studies Journal, two edited collections on race and popular culture, and the Encyclopedia of Latinas and Latinos in the U.S. Next year, Professor Johnson will be a fellow in the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. She is completing a manuscript entitled The Future Has a Past: Politics, Music and Memory in Afro-Chicano Los Angeles
The lecture will be in English.
Sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies.
"Dominicanish "is an acclaimed one-woman show by Dominican-York actress and writer Josefina Baez. The show, which first opened in New York in 1999, combines poetry, dance, and music in an inspirational rendition of the experience of migration, language acquisition and multi-ethnic encounters. The actress employs Kachipudi (a southern Indian dance) to emphasize the significance of multi-cultural encounters that makeup our post-modern, trans-national world. Sponsored by: The Bildner Foundation, IDE, Leslie Center for the Humanities, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, Dept. of Theater, Dominican Student Group and LALACS
Well-known Brazilian filmmaker, Tizuka Yamasaki certainly looks Japanese, but sounds unquestionably Brazilian. The granddaughter of Japanese immigrants to Brazil will give a talk, on the interconnections between the two cultures. She will illustrate her comments with the showing of her film, “Gaijin - Love Me As I Am" (2005), named after the Japanese term for foreigner or outsider. Dr. Carlos Nakamura, former MALS student, will translate Tizuka's talk and give a brief chronological history of the 100 years of the Japanese immigration to Brazil.
Saturday, April 12, 2008 at 2 pm in Carson Hall room L01
Talk by Paddy Woodworth Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Paddy Woodworth (author and journalist, b. 1951, Bray, Ireland) has written extensively for the Irish Times and is well known for his acclaimed, Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL, and Spanish Democracy (Yale UP, 2003). He has worked for numerous publications, including the London Times, the Sunday Times, The International Herald Tribune, El País, Política Exterior, the International Journal of Iberian Studies, the World Policy Journal, BBC Wildlife and The Scientist. He has broadcast for Radio Telifís Éireann (RTE), the BBC, Sky, Spanish radio and television and US networks. The Basque Country – A Cultural History is in the new ‘Landscapes of the Imagination’ travel essays series for Signal, published in the US by Oxford University Press. He is currently researching and writing Repairing the Earth, Restoring the Future, a book which will assess the capacity of ecological restoration to meet the challenge of environmental crises. Books by Paddy Woodworth.
Sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding, The Rockefeller Center, and The Ticknor Fund.
Talk with Professor Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht on ht Friday, February 29, 2008. Professor Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Guérard Professor in Literature and Professor of French & Italian and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and is affiliated with the Department of German Studies, and the Program in Modern Thought & Literature. His areas of interests are Medieval "literature" and culture; Spanish, French, German, and Italian literatures since the Renaissance; Argentinian and Brazilian literatures in the 19th and 20th centuries; Aesthetics; History of Ideas, History of Scholarship. Among his many publications are worth mentioning the books: Making Sense in Life and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). Preface by Wlad Godzich. In 1926. Living at the Edge of Time. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997) [Portuguese translation entitled Em 1926. Vivendo no Limite do Tempo (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Record, 1999)], The Powers of Philology. Dynamics of Textual Scholarship. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003) [Spanish translation forthcoming at Editorial Iberoamericana, Mexico City], and the Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford UP, 2004). For his current projects see his web page and his Books at Amazon.com.
Sponsored by the Spanish and Portuguese Department
1808-2008 GOYA AND THE FOUNDATION OF MODERNITY1808 is the turning point in Spain’s struggle between the Old Regime and the Modern era defined by the influence of the French Revolution and the new order Napoleon imposed on Europe. Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, a privileged witness of the social and political upheavals of his time, was an exceptional Spanish artist situated at the crossroads of the Age of the Enlightenment and the emerging Romantic movement who masterfully represented the challenges of the turbulent years in which he lived. Critics have considered Goya’s work one of the pillars of modern art because it insightfully anticipates the vertiginous advances but also the harsh brutalities of the next two centuries. This one-day Symposium seeks to reflect upon Goya’s legacy as an artist and thinker two hundred years after the events portrayed in his renowned paintings The Second of May 1808 (The Charge of the Mamelukes) and The Third of May, 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid. SEE FLYER
Thursday, February 28, 2008 at the Leslie Center for the Humanities, Kreindler Conference Hall The MORNING SESSION with Introductory Remarks with Katharine Conley, Associate Dean of the Faculty for the Arts and Humanities (Dartmouth College). Speakers were: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford University) "The Epistemological Place of Goya's "Caprichos", Luis Fernández Cifuentes (Harvard University) Goya and Money, Marvin D’Lugo (Clark University) The Cinematic Goya . The Moderator was José M. del Pino, Department of Spanish & Portuguese (Dartmouth College) AFTERNOON SESSION was at the Leslie Center for the Humanities Kreindler Conference Hal. Speakers were: Andrew Schulz ’86 (University of Oregon) Goya's 'Second of May 1808' and the Spanish War with Napoleon as 'Reconquest', Janis Tomlinson (Director of Museums-University of Delaware) After the Hero: Goya and Gericault 1814-1824. The Moderator was Angela Rosentha, Department of Art History (Dartmouth College). A CURATORIAL SESSION At the Hood Museum of Art Katherine Hart, Curator of Academic Programming (Hood Museum-Dartmouth College). Goya's Etchings in the Hood's Collection followed by a RECEPTION at the Kim Gallery, Hood Museum of Art.
Sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Leslie Center for the Humanities, John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding, Office of the Dean, Hood Museum of Art, Department of Art History, and the Spanish Consulate at Boston.
February 15, 2008: Rubén Gallo (B.A., Yale; Ph.D., Columbia U.), Old Dominion Fellow and Associate Professor of Spanish-American literature at Princeton University, is the author of Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution (MIT Press, 2005), a study of how five artifacts – cameras, typewriters, radio, cement, and stadiums – shaped the representation of modernity in Mexican art and literature of the post-revolutionary period. He has also published New Tendencies in Mexican Art: the 1990s (Palgrave, 2004), a cultural study of young installation artists and their relation to Mexico City, and The Mexico City Reader (Wisconsin, 2004; published in Spanish as México DF: Lecturas para paseantes, Turner, 2005), an anthology of literary texts on the Mexican megalopolis after 1968. His most recent publication is Heterodoxos mexicanos: una antología dialogada, co-authored with Ignacio Padila. He is currently at work on Freud in Mexico: the Neuroses of Modernity. Books on Amazon.com
On Tuesday, November 27, 2007 at 4 pm in Dartmouth Hall room 217, lecture by José María Merino.
by Laura Freixas on Tuesday, November 13, 2007.
Lecture by Enric Bou on Thursday, November 8, 2007.
Lecture in Spanish by Victor Vich on Thursday, November 1, 2007.
Thursday, April 26, 2007- Professor Pilar Rodríguez, Universidad de Deusto-San Sebastián (Basque Country-Spain) will be giving a talk on the cultural tensions present in recent immigration in Spain and France ("Screening the Riots: Gender and Race in France and Spain"). This talk is an event coordinated under the Women and Migration Lecture Series and is sponsored by the Women's and Gender Studies Program and the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding.
April 12, 2007: Spanish Writer, José Ovejero
This play is based on the more than 20,000 testimonies of victims of Peru's Sendero Luminoso war gathered by Latin America's only Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Preformed by Teresa Ralli and directed by Miguel Rubio, founders of Yuyachkani, one of Latin America's premier theatre collectives and among the longest running.
March 1, 2007, Professor Noel Valis from Yale University
February 16, 2007 Professor Brad Epps from Harvard University
November 15, 2006 Associate Professor Fernando J. Rosenberg from Brandeis University
November 9, 2006 Professor Gonzalo Navajas from University of California - Irvine
October 26, 2006 Mexican Writer in residence Fritz Glockner
May 30, 2006 Professor Carme Riera from Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona
May 10, 2006 Teresa Ralli, Director and Founder of one of Latin America's most important theatre collective, Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani
April 27, 2006 Associate Professor Mario Santana from Center for Latin American Studies
March 1, 2006 Chair and Professor Dieter Ingenschay from Humbolt University - Berlin
November 14, 2005 Professor David T. Gies from University of Virginia
September 28, 2005 Associate Professor Robert T. Conn ’83 from Wesleyan University
