International Conference: Border Subjects/Global Hispanisms, Birkbeck University, London, Friday 24 & Saturday 25 November 2017

This conference brings together scholars, curators, filmmakers, writers, and post-graduate students from Latin America and the Caribbean, the United States, Europe, and the UK. It stems from the ongoing collaboration between members of staff from the programmes of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, UK and the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures, at the University of Pittsburgh, USA.

The processes we associate with contemporary forms of ‘globalization’ have – be they economic, political or cultural –spawned a variety of re-worldings that, via a number of transdisciplinary formations, have reconfigured the humanities, including Hispanism and Latin-Americanism, Cultural Studies, Postmodernism, Post-colonialism and even Post-structuralism being the most well-known. After the financial crisis, new (and not so new) trans, de-, and/or non-national or regional objects, subjects and assemblages are coming to the fore, redrawing and digitalizing established frontiers and differences as well as re-defining the politics of culture and its study. Before our very eyes, the transversal routes of migration world-wide are breaking down established frontiers, both in the old metropoli and in the so-called peripheries, at whose sites new cultural and political subjects are emerging. In the light of this global expansion of neoliberalism and new forms of governmentality, as well as the histories globalization brings into view, what are the concerns that are or should define the research agenda of a newly globalized Hispanism? In this conference, we revisit Luso-Hispanic and Latin@-American geographies, and reconsider the subjectivities emerging out of the above mentioned processes, in their varying conditions and trajectories, and also by way of the items in the material culture that conspire in their fashioning.

This conference is generously supported by The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities (BIH) and the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies (CILAVS), both at Birkbeck, University of London. The Instituto Cervantes has also provided support for this event. In collaboration with Canning House and the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies (CILAVS), a conversation between Ticio Escobar and John Kraniauskas will be hosted on Thursday 23 November 2017. Further information TBA.

Programme

Friday 24th November

Venue: Birkbeck, University of London Clore Management Lecture Theatre, Clore Management Centre, Torrington Square, London WC1E 7JL

9.30-9.45am            Welcome
Carmen Fracchia and Mari Paz Balibrea (CILAVS), Birkbeck, University of London

Session 1                  Black Nations in Imperial Spain
Chair, Carmen Fracchia, Birkbeck, University of London

9.45-11.15am          Elizabeth Wright, University of Georgia, ‘A Black Bard in the Court of Philip II’

Luis Méndez Rodríguez, University of Seville, ‘Another Way of Seeing Black Spain, Art, Society and Religion’

Helen Melling, Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London, ‘Envisioning Black Confraternities in Nineteenth-Century Peru’

11.15-11.30am        Tea/Coffee Break

Session 2                New Ecologies/ Post-Indigenism/ Museum Cultures in Latin America* Chair, Luciana Martins, Birkbeck, University of London

11.30-12.45pm        Sarah Radcliffe, University of Cambridge, ‘Border knowledges and socionatures: Sumak kawsay and de-/re-colonising food sovereignty in Ecuador’

Agata Lulkowska, PhD student, Birkbeck, University of London, ‘Transcending the borders of ‘indigenous’ filmmaking in Colombia’

Ticio Escobar, Museo de Arte Indígena Asunción, Lawyer, Author, Art Critic, and, former Minister of Culture of Paraguay, ‘Cultural critique as a positioning of the frontier, contemporaneity and difference’

*Please note that Ticio Escobar’s paper ‘La crítica cultural como posición de frontera, contemporaneidad y diferencia’ will be presented in Spanish.

12.45-2.30pm          Lunch

Session 3                  Transgressing Political Borders*
Chair, Luís Trindade, Birkbeck, University of London

2.30-4.00pm             Polly Savage, SOAS, University of London, ‘Transnational Art Education and International Solidarity with Independent Mozambique’

Christabelle Peters, University of Bristol, ‘Mana Africa, The Cultural Politics of Female Solidarity in Cuban-African Cooperation’

Inês Galvão, PhD student, University of Lisbon, ‘Crossing struggles through militant journalism: anti-apartheid, feminism and anti-colonialism in the trajectory of Stephanie Urdang’

*Please note this panel will continue at Birkbeck Cinema after the break. The Birkbeck Cinema is in 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD.

4.00-5.00pm             Tea/Coffee Break

6.00 – 9.00pm

Film Screening*:     Spell Reel, 2017. Germany/Portugal/France/Guinea-Bissau. Directed by Filipa César. In Portuguese, Fula, Guinea-Bissau Creole, English, French; English subtitles. 96 min.

*To be screened with the presence of filmmaker Filipa César.

Spell Reel is the result of a multifaceted research and digitisation project that she initiated in 2011 with Sana na N’Hada and Flora Gomes. Having studied film in Cuba, the two began using the camera to observe the fight for independence in Guinea-Bissau (1963–74). After the decaying visual and audio material was digitised in Berlin, the filmmakers travelled with a mobile cinema to the places where the footage had originally been shot and showed it to audiences for the first time, adding their own commentary. They then moved on, also returning to Berlin. Spell Reel watches an archive at work to produce the present.

Programme

Saturday 25th November

Venue, Birkbeck, University of London. Room B36, Malet Street Main Building, London WC1E 7HX. Torrington Square entrance

Session 4                  Deterrioralization-Reterriorilization
Chair, John Kraniauskas, Birkbeck, University of London

10-11.30am              Juan Duchesne-Winter, University of Pittsburgh, ‘Neoanimism, South-South deterritorializations’

Jerome Branche, University of Pittsburgh, ‘The Bones of San José: Of Memory, Museums, and the Necropolitics of Slavery’

Conrad James, University of Birmingham, ‘You Should Know the Score by Now’, Spanish Caribbean (Native) New Yorkers’

11.30-11.45am        Tea/Coffee Break

Session 5                  Spaces of Flow, Travel and Friction
Chair, Patricia Siqueiras Bras, Birkbeck, University of London

11.45-1.15pm          Rory O’Bryen, University of Cambridge, ’The Fetish of Flow, Circulating Capital and The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Colombia’

Toby Green, King’s College London, ‘Travelling Concepts in the Atlantic World, Decoding Origins, Rethinking Alternatives’

Juan Poblete, University of California-Santa Cruz, ‘Americanism/o, Latin/o American frictions inside the United States’

1.15-3.00pm             Lunch

Session 6                  Latin Americanism in its Transtemporal Globality
Chair, Emily Baker, Birkbeck, University of London

3.00-4.30pm             Gonzalo Lamana, University of Pittsburgh, ‘Unthinkable Indians, Race, Coloniality and Metanoia in Colonial Peru’

Daniel Balderston, University of Pittsburgh, ‘Piglia’s Diaries, Recovering the Gestation of Plata quemada’