Emily Baker (UCL): Possible Worlds: Contemporary Latin American Ecological Fiction

Talk delivered on 1 February 2024 as part of the University of Manchester’s Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies research seminar series.

Emily Baker is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature and Latin American Studies at University College London.

Abstract: One of the key questions at the heart of ecological fiction is: what is the relationship between language/culture and ‘the real’. The anthropologist Anna Tsing argues that: ‘To appreciate the patchy unpredictability associated with our current condition, we need to reopen our imaginations’. For Eduardo Kohn in his seminal work How Forests Think, ‘language is nested within broader forms of representation that have their own distinctive properties … open to the emerging worlds around us’. This presentation examines work that engages with the question of the interface between representation and ‘the real’ explicitly and self-reflexively. Drawing upon case studies from contemporary Latin American ecofiction, this presentation will primarily focus upon two very different novels as a function of the ‘possible’ or ’emerging’ worlds that they stage. The first is El camino de Ida/The Way Out (2013) the last novel written before his death by the canonical Argentine author Ricardo Piglia; a realist campus novel set in a fictionalised version of Princeton where the author worked, which tells the story of the U.S. domestic terrorist the Unabomber, with an ecological slant. The second is La mucama de Omicunlé/Tentacle (2015) by queer Dominican author Rita Indiana. This speculative fiction sets out a near possible future of ecological disaster with the opportunity for a character to travel back in time and prevent that future from playing out. Despite pertaining to different literary genres, I argue that both demonstrate that culture is the privileged terrain upon which ecological crisis is negotiated.

Eduardo Restrepo (Universidad Católica de Temuco): ‘“Blancos” en un mundo negro: marcaciones raciales y distinciones de clase en Tumaco, Pacífico sur colombiano’

Talk delivered online on 8 November 2023 as part of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies research seminar series.

Eduardo Restrepo is Investigador Adjunto at the Universidad Católica de Temuco.

Abstract: Tumaco es un poblado costero del Pacífico sur colombiano con cerca de unos ciento cincuenta mil habitantes en su casco urbano, de los cuales la inmensa mayoría se percibe como negra. Desde el siglo XXI se instaló una élite comercial y política blanca, descendientes de europeos y algunos asiáticos, que establecieron una sociedad racializada, con claras distinciones espaciales y de clase. Esto contrasta con la Tumaco de hoy, donde las relaciones de poder se han transformado sustancialmente y en donde los “blancos” no se encuentran necesariamente en un lugar del privilegio racial. En esta charla se abordarán las marcaciones raciales y las distinciones de clase que operan hoy en Tumaco, mostrando cómo el contraste blanco/negro se queda corto ante las múltiples articulaciones racializadas y enclasadas que consitituyen las experiencias y subjetividades de los tumaqueños.

Carlos Halaburda (Cologne): “Queer Networks of Scandal in the Global Nineteenth Century”

Talk delivered on 15 November 2023 as part of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies research seminar series.

Carlos Halaburda is currently a Marie Skłodowska Curie Research Fellow at the University of Cologne, Germany.

Abstract: In 1887, Félix Carlier, Chief Police of the Parisian Vice Squad argued that homosexuality was a “great scandal” carried out by a “cosmopolitan Freemasonry” belonging to no country, but “binding on all.” What is the role of scandal in the shaping of a cosmopolitan queer subjectivity in the global nineteenth century? This presentation examines the transmission, translation and adaptation of scientific and literary discourses about homosexual scandals by looking at transatlantic knowledge exchanges, with emphasis in two circuits: 1) France, Germany, and Spanish America, and 2) Brazil and Great Britain. The main objective is to uncover queer practices of subjectivation deemed scandalous for the medical mindset of the time. Through scandal, global queer populations sought to advance innovative models of affective and cultural bonds that put at stake the heteronormative paradigm of human relations. These models were grounded in two fundamental pillars of common affiliation, with their distinct vernacular imprints: firstly, the cultivation of experimental gender-bending aesthetics including fashion, artistic taste, and literary creativity; and secondly, the cultivation of erotic agencies characterized by their continual redefinition of sexual, gender, class, and racial boundaries. As the categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality were invented within a nineteenth-century paradigm of empiricism and taxonomic delineation, medico-legal experts formulated an encyclopaedic map of normative and non-normative identities, thereby subjecting queer bodies to systematic scrutiny and legal sanctions. And yet, the uranist scandal, characterized by its provocative, dynamic, and adaptable nature, served as a mechanism of collective identification meticulously devised to challenge the indisputability of heterosexuality as a standardized form of life. Texts by Félix Carlier, Luis M. Aguirre, Max-Bembo, Luis Montané y Dardé, Richard von Krafft-Ebing Magnus Hirschfeld, Leonidio Ribeiro, Otto Miguel Cione, among others, will be discussed.

Nuno Pinto (UoM): “Better decision support for better urban governance: How decision-support knowledge and methods help different stakeholders, examples from Brazil, Mexico and Ecuador”

Recording of a talk delivered on 18 October 2023 by Dr Nuno Pinto, Senior Lecturer in Urban Planning and Urban Design at the School of Environment, Education and Development of the University of Manchester, for the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies research seminar series 2023-24.

Abstract: Participation is a key factor for successful engagement of the public in different governance processes in urban planning, for example at community level or in infrastructure planning. While some planning/policy contexts include more sophisticated and matured mechanisms for participation, as in the English and other Global North planning systems, others are still lacking proper integration of the public opinion as a governance tool. This presentation shows the results of an ongoing research agenda that is investigating the extension to which different community and institutional stakeholders incorporate knowledge in decision-support methods/tools in their activities to improve their outcomes and to learn, from these groups’ practices, what could be improved in established decision-support methods. Case studies in São Paulo and Brasília (Brazil), Guadalajara (Mexico) and Guayaquil (Ecuador) will be used to guide the discussion.

Lorraine Leu (Texas): “Settlement: Notions of Home and Black Visual Culture in 21st Century Brazil”

Talk delivered on 2 February 2023 as part of the University of Manchester’s Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies research seminar series. Unfortunately, due to the ice storm affecting Texas, the discussion was cut short, but luckily Lorraine delivered the totality of her presentation.

Update from James Scorer re. research activities

We are posting some updates re. research activities by members of the University of Manchester’s Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. This time, from Dr James Scorer, Senior Lecturer in Latin American Cultural Studies and Associate Director for Research – CIDRAL at the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures.

I have been continuing work on Latin American comics, publishing an article on neoextractivism in two graphic works, Paying the Land by Maltese-American Joe Sacco and La guerra por el agua by Nelly Luna Amancio and Jesús Cossio, in the online journal IdeAs: Idées d’Amériques. I also recently finished the manuscript for a book on Latin American comics, provisionally entitled Transgressing the Frame: Latin American Comics in the Twenty-First Century. Otherwise, I was involved in workshops take took place in Peru as part of the AHRC-funded project Comics and Race in Latin America. Working with Espacio los Únicos and Sara La Torre we produced a collective zine that can be downloaded. Elsewhere on the project website you can find information about our project artists, our collaborators, and some written reflections on racial identities in Latin American comics.

Update from Peter Wade re. research activities

We are posting some updates re. research activities by members of the University of Manchester’s Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. This time, from Prof Peter Wade, co-director of CLACS.

After the success of the Festival of Latin American Anti-Racist and Decolonial Art held as part of our CARLA project (Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America), a series of events have been organised by our collaborators in Argentina, Brazil and Colombia to promote CARLA’s online exhibition and showcase the work of our artistic partners. In Argentina, for example, a second edition of the book Marrones Escriben has been produced by the artistic collective Identidad Marrón, and launched in various places, including Hamburg. In Argentina too, the occasion of the Dia Nacional de lxs Afroargentinos y la Cultura Afro (8 Nov) was used to show the play No es país para negras, II, presented by Teatro en Sepia. This was followed by a debate on structural racism, which featured special guest Lorena Cañuqueo, of Teatro Mapuche El Katango, a company that, as part of its participation in CARLA, has been collaborating with Teatro en Sepia. 

In Brazil, an exhibition and talks on anti-racist Indigenous art are being held until 2 December at the Museo de Arte Sacra of the Universidade Federal da Bahia. In Colombia, a major event with the title Entrecaminos Antirracistas y Feministas was held on 3 November under the aegis of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia’s Escuela de Estudios de Género. 

The CORALA project (Comics and Race in Latin America) has also been active, with a research trip to Lima that brought together the UoM project team and the six comics artists that are collaborating with the project – two each from Argentina, Colombia and Peru. One outcome was a zine to which we all contributed. We are currently planning another trip to Cali, Colombia, where we will all meet up again with a packed agenda of public engagement activities, organised in conjunction with the local branch of the Área Cultural of the Banco de la República, two local universities and some local cultural centres.

Olivia Casagrande (Sheffield): “Subversive aesthetics and anticolonial indigeneity in Santiago de Chile”

On Wed 19 October, as part of the University of Manchester’s Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies research seminar series, Olivia Casagrande (Sheffield) presented the book Performing the jumbled city Subversive aesthetics and anticolonial indigeneity in Santiago de Chile (Manchester University Press, 2022), which she edited with Claudio Alvarado Lincopi, and Roberto Cayuqueo Martínez. The book, which is available as Open Source, builds on analyses of the relationship between race, aesthetics and politics, and elaborates on the epistemological possibilities arising from collaborative and decolonial methodologies at the intersection of ethnography, art, performance and the urban space.

Alfredo Villar (Independent): “De la historieta a la historia: Conflicto armado interno, memorias y contra estéticas visuales en la narrativa gráfica peruana”

Talk given (in Spanish) on Wed 5 October, as part of the University of Manchester’s Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies research seminar series.

Abstract: El conflicto armado interno peruano produjo un conjunto de memorias que aún continúan en disputa. Una primera narrativa totalizadora intentó ser el Informe Final de la CVR, aunque distintas narrativas políticas comenzaron a cuestionar y a disputar su condición de “verdad”. Pero los protagonistas del conflicto, desde mucho antes, también habían generado distintas memorias y narrativas visuales más allá del canon político y estético oficial. La ponencia intenta rastrear algunas de esas narrativas y contra estéticas visuales, sobre todo desde el arte popular y la historieta, que presentan nuevos contenidos de verdad. También se presenta el caso de RUPAY historieta de creación colectiva que en su propia narrativa visual usó elementos de esas diversas y disidentes memorias políticas y visuales.

Alfredo Villar is a Peruvian writer, art historian, and curator specializing in Amazonic and contemporary urban culture and music. He has published fiction and poetry books and also a graphic novel, “Rupay,” that was possible because of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. He is very active in the art scene where he has curated the Amazonic art and chicha art expositions. Alfredo was part of the 2015 Smithsonian Folklife Festival dedicated to Peru, with a group of Amazonic and chicha artists and musicians. Additionally, he plays Amazonic and chicha music under the name of DJ SABROSO. He is the author of YAWAR CHICHA: Los ríos profundos de la música tropical peruana (Lima, 2022).

Carolina Cambre (Concordia University, Canada): “Molecular insurrections: An experiment in Visual Narrative Inquiry in Buenos Aires, Argentina”

Carolina Cambre (Concordia University, Canada): “Molecular insurrections: An experiment in Visual Narrative Inquiry in Buenos Aires, Argentina”

Talk given as part of the University of Manchester’s Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies research seminar series 2021/22 on 23 March 2022.

Abstract: I remember that I arrived that day … and I was very struck by the pullovers embracing the whole building, surrounding the whole building, um, and that image, that sensation is strange, that image, that feeling, the effect that it has, at least for me, because although, um, the pullover that embraces is something warm and it’s giving the building a hug, which I think is the meaning, for me there is also something of, of a body that is not in those clothes and that can also represent the, let’s say, all the kids that, that are not taken into account, let’s say, those, that is, in the end that’s it, it’s a piece of clothing that, and there’s a body missing there. It seems to me that it is the denied body of these boys and girls who go to this place. (Interview transcript 0007) This is the story of research conducted through visual narrative inquiry in Buenos Aires where we used photographs as a “form of field text” (Bach 2007, p. 290), but the way emotions ruptured storytelling post-facto could not be ignored. School #70 Isauro Arancibia is an unofficial Argentine self-managed school for students of all ages who live in precarious situations whether due to housing or schooling conditions; homelessness; economic hardship; or cultural violence against their ways of acting, believing and perceiving. The affective forces triggered when using an innovated photo-elicitation technique to discuss the school’s 2016 re-inauguration event and what they revealed. We situate the event, which marked and celebrated a momentary victory over the municipal authorities, as a critical incident because we found that more-than-memory of the event was reverberating on a subjective level. Individuals questioning “dominant modes of subjectivation” (Guattari & Rolnik 2007 p. 187) those produced by a capitalist system, and by beginning to observe how they reproduce or resist those modes, they initiate a validation of “molecular social practices” (p. 189). Because the practice of a micropolitics cannot ensure these molecular shifts will avoid “systems that coopt them, systems of neutralization, or processes of implosion or self-destruction” (p. 339), we refer to them as molecular insurrections. In a situation as trying and soul-wrenching as that of the Isauro, it is challenging for community members to endure, turnover is high, but change is possible. Visual and embodied ways of researching helped us connect with individuals who work on breaking down divisions of inclusion and exclusion. Here we learn, through their stories, about how a marginalized community can bring novel social forces into view, especially when focusing on relationships and acknowledging the voices of those often treated as unimportant.

Carolina Cambre is an Associate Professor at Concordia University, Montréal