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.

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.