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.

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).

Paul Merchant (Bristol): ‘An Archipelagic Nation? Ecology and Identity on Chile’s Pacific Coast’

Talk given on 27 October 2021 as part of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies research seminar series 2020/21.

Paul Merchant is Senior Lecturer in Latin American Film and Visual Culture at the University of Bristol.

Abstract: Discussions of identity, coloniality and ecology in the Pacific world have rarely considered that ocean’s eastern edge. Yet Chile’s complex relations with the cultures of its southern archipelago and its remote island territory of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) make it unquestionably a Pacific nation. Drawing on research carried out during my current AHRC Fellowship, this paper argues that when considering the intersection of environmental and social challenges in contemporary Chile, there is much to be gained by adopting an approach grounded in ‘archipelagic thinking’ (Martínez-San Miguel and Stephens 2020), which has to date been more familiar in Caribbean and Oceanic contexts. Through an analysis of recent documentary and essay films, as well as sound and installation art, I suggest that the project of decolonising our approach to the environmental humanities in Latin America is best served by an openness to multiple and incommensurable ‘ecological epistemes’ (Escobar 2020).

Erika Edwards (UNC Charlotte): ‘Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women the Law and the Making of a White Argentine Republic’

Talk given by Prof. Erika Edwards on 10 Nov 2021, as part of UoM Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies research seminar series 2020/21.

Erika Edwards is Associate Professor at UNC Charlotte

Based on her award-winning book, this presentation is a gendered analysis of black invisibility in Argentina. It focuses on Black and African descended women who actively partook in the construction of racial identities during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Focused on the household and intimate relationships that ensued, Edwards argues that Black and African descended concubines, wives, mothers, and daughters are central to understanding the making of a white Argentine nation.

María Elena Bedoya Hidalgo (Manchester): ‘Naming the past: On antiquities, collecting practices and musealization in the Andes, 1892-1915’

Talk given on 15 December 2021 by María Elena Bedoya Hidalgo for the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies research seminar series 2020/21.

María Elena is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Manchester: https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk.

Abstract: In this talk I discuss some aspects of the research presented in my book Antigüedades y nación. Coleccionismo de objetos precolombinos y musealización en los Andes, 1892-1915 (Antiquities and nation. Collecting pre-Columbian objects and musealization in the Andes, 1892-1915). I am interested in the process of construction of a specialized knowledge about the past and its objects, promoted by intellectual-collectors in Ecuador, Peru and Colombia. First, I will analyze how indigenous antiquities were valued as diplomatic transactions articulated to a Hispanist ideology. The Madrid Exhibition of 1892 was a transatlantic event that constructed a pan-Hispanic, masculine and colonial gaze, which is a musealized historical fact in itself. Secondly, I focus on the processes of musealization as forms of public projection of national material imaginaries. In this sense, I study the administrative forms in museums and the disputes over pre-Columbian objects that arise in the management of collections.

Valentina Guevara Prize

The Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Manchester invites submissions for the Valentina Guevara Prize, established by Cecilia Pardiñas-Guevara, for the most original essay on an Argentine topic in any discipline. The prize is aimed principally for taught postgraduate students but outstanding essays by final-year undergraduate students will also be considered. Students enrolled in a British university at the moment (2021-22) or in the immediately preceding academic year (2020-21) are eligible. The value of the prize is £150.

Submissions can be in English or Spanish and must not exceed 15,000 words, including notes and references. They must include a word count and page numbers. Both regular coursework essays and texts produced specifically for the award are eligible. Essays need to be submitted on behalf of the student by a member of academic staff or supervisor at the department where they are based. They should be sent in by 30 November, 6pm, to Ignacio Aguiló (ignacio.aguilo@manchester.ac.uk). The jury will be composed of members of CLACS Steering Committee who reserve the right not to declare a winner if the submissions received are not of sufficient quality.

Pic: Carlos Adampol

Patricio Simonetto: ‘The global making of travestis’ popular culture and daily life technologies’

Recording of the talk given by Patricio Simonetto (UCL) on 24 February 2021 as part of the University of Manchester’s Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies’ research seminar series.

Abstract: This presentation analyzes the global making of travestis’ culture and how it changes their interpretations and uses of daily technologies. In this sense, it reconstructs the role played by migration, visiting artist, circulation of narratives, pictures and knowledge in the changing notions about embodiment techniques. It will point out that during the sixties and seventies the emergence of travestis artistas played a role in the differentiation of travesties daily practice in the making of their womanhood, enabling, and querying the realness of their body. It argues that the global circulation of spectacles, local appropriations, inventions and narrative acted as meditations to enable travestis’ body and identity experience. The making of this diverse visible rich culture was a platform of hybridization with which gestures, knowledge and technologies articulated new meanings of the making of gender experience and the progressive elaboration of a more stable identity. The circulation of photographs and narratives of local or foreign travestis, made visible multiple technologies of intimacy, understood here as the administration of gestures – related to gender, sexuality, class and body conventions – that mediated spaces of negotiation of a stigmatized existence and presented it as a “living possibility”. These narratives put in circulation new ideas about reaching new sex beyond the one that was assigned at birth, as well as, the foundation of an experience of a frontier that moved beyond binary notions as it was being travesti. This perspective connects identity and incarnation, community cultures with daily technologies, by showing how some bodily experiences reached new meanings in concrete contexts.