“Accidental Latin@ Archives: From Movimiento to YouTube": A lecture and performance by Urayoán Noel

 

The first part of the presentation explores the work of two experimental 1960s and 1970s art collectives, the Royal Chicano Air Force and El Puerto Rican Embassy, as part of an alternative genealogy of Latin@ social movement politics that foregrounds the politics of remediation in and against the politics of representation. Bridging two very different conceptualizations of the "accidental" archive, (Sauer, Burgess and Green), the presentation further considers how these art collectives paradoxically function as eccentric (counter-) archives in the context of their online circulation, allowing for a critical revision of print-centric Latin@ canons. The second part of the presentation consists of a brief poetry reading/artist talk that performs the accidental archive, incorporating YouTube, mobile apps, and references to these alternative Latin@ genealogies. 

 Urayoán Noel is a poet, critic, performer, translator, and professor of English and Spanish at New York University. He is the author of the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa Press, 2014), winner of the Latina/o Studies Book Prize from the Latin American Studies Association, and several books of poetry in English and Spanish, the most recent of which is Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico (University of Arizona Press, 2015).   He has also produced poetry in a range of alternative formats, including the CD and DVD, the artist book, the digital archive, and the multimedia installation. A contributing editor of NACLA Report on the Americas and Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Noel has been a fellow of the Ford Foundation and CantoMundo, and his creative and critical writings have appeared in Bomb, Contemporary Literature, Fence, Lana Turner, Latino Studies, Small Axe, and in numerous anthologies.  Originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, Urayoán Noel lives in the Bronx and recently completed a bilingual edition of the poetry of Pablo de Rokha for Shearsman Books.