Center for Latin American Studies-- UPDATES (9/30 to 10/3)

Tango: Sex and the Rhythm of the City

by

Marianella Yanes (Venezuelan writer)

 

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

1:00 p.m.

Humanities Center

602 Cathedral of Learning

Marianella Yanes is a Venezuelan writer, journalist and playwright. Marianella Yanes and Mike Gonzalez are the authors of Tango: Sex and Rhythm of the City (Reaktion Books, 2013).

 

 

(Part of the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures 50th Anniversary Celebration—for updates please visit: http://www.hispanic.pitt.edu/ )

 

 

 

 

Portraiture and Enslavement: Reflections on a Transatlantic Archive

by

Agnes Lugo-Ortiz (Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Literatures and Cultures, University of Chicago)

 

Friday, October 3, 2014

Humanities Center

602 Cathedral of Learning

3:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.

 

(Part of the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures 50th Anniversary Celebration—for updates please visit: http://www.hispanic.pitt.edu/ )

 

Abstract of the Lecture:

This talk will focus on the individualized portrayal of enslaved people from the time of Europe’s full engagement with plantation slavery in the late sixteenth century to its official abolition in Brazil in 1888. While this period saw the emergence of portraiture as a major field of representation in Western art, “slave” and “portraiture” as categories appear to be mutually exclusive. On the one hand, the logic of chattel slavery sought to render the slave’s body as an instrument for production, as the site of a non-subject. Portraiture, on the contrary, privileged the face as the primary visual matrix for the representation of a distinct individuality. Agnes Lugo-Ortiz will reflect upon the conceptual challenges that emerge from the juxtaposition of these seemingly antithetical notions of "enslavement" and "portraiture" and on the particularities of its archival endeavor.

 

Agnes Lugo-Ortiz is associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean Literatures and Cultures at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Identidades imaginadas: Biografía y nacionalidad en el horizonte de la guerra (Cuba, 1860-1898) (University of Puerto Rico Press, 1999) and co-editor of Herencia: The Anthology of US Hispanic Writing (Oxford UP, 2001), En otra voz: Antología de la Literatura Hispana de los Estados Unidos, Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Hertiage, Volume V (both with Arte Público Press, 2002 and 2006 respectively), and Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World (Cambridge UP, 2013), as well as of numerous essays on nineteenth- and twentieth -centuries Latin American and Caribbean literatures. 

 

For more information contact: Aurelia Sotomayor at ams389@pitt.edu

 

Sponsored by the Humanities Center, Center for Latin American Studies, Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures, Department of Sociology, and Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh.

 

 

 

 

Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS)

University Center for International Studies

University of Pittsburgh

4200 Wesley W. Posvar Hall

Pittsburgh, PA  15260

Office: 412-648-7392

Fax: 412-648-2199

clas@pitt.edu