This Monday: Lecture by Dr. John Ochoa

 

The Center for Latin American Studies and

the Humanities Center

 

 

present

 

 

'Subversive Vermin': Marcos's Zapatismo, Anti-Neoliberal Discourse, and Cold War Anxiety

 

 

a public lecture by

 

 

 

Dr. John Ochoa
(Associate Professor, Department of Spanish,

Italian and Portuguese, Penn State University)

 

 

Date: Monday, February 1^st, 2010

Time: 3:00 – 4:30 p.m. (reception to follow)

Location: 602 Cathedral of Learning

For further information please contact jkl7@pitt.edu

 

 

The 1990s emergence of Zapatismo in Chiapas, Mexico, was at once a highly local movement in defense of indigenous rights as well as a grand political gesture against capitalist globalization.  The coexistence of these two vastly different battle-fronts within a single, emancipatory language is further complicated when we consider the intellectual history of the rhetorical strategies that underwrite this very language of emancipation. This lecture explores the hidden affinities between Zapatista anti-neoliberalism and the Cold War discourse of anticommunism, along with the political implications of this intersection.

 

John Ochoa is the author of The Uses of Failure in Mexican Literature and Identity (2005) and editor of Bitacora del cruce (2006), an anthology of the work of Guillermo Gómez Peña.