Fri, April 8, 2016 12:00 PM - 5:00 PM UBC Point Grey Campus. The Latin America and the Global research group is inviting the academic community concerned with the culture and economy of development in the Global South to join us in this exciting day of activities offered by Dr. Ericka Beckman, Associate Professor in Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
WORKSHOP: “Unfinished Transitions: The Dialectics of Rural Modernization in Latin American Fiction”
12-2pm
In this workshop, participants will discuss Dr. Beckman’s more recent article, which has been accepted by the journal Modernism/Modernity and is still in the editing stage. This essay explores how two key works of mid-twentieth-century fiction registered the uneven and contradictory dynamics of rural modernization in Latin America. While it remains commonplace to associate the rural with tradition and/or backwardness, this essay explores how Latin American fiction envisioned rural spaces as sites of particularly violent processes of modernization in their own right. In Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955) and José Donoso’s El lugar sin límites (1966), Beckman shows, modernization is figured as a kind of living hell, in which rural spaces are alternately drawn into and thrown out of circuits of capital accumulation at different moments of history. Drawing from these two texts, the author points to larger ways in which Latin American fiction depicted the creation and destruction of rural worlds during the long twentieth century.
Limited spots, light lunch will be served. RSVP REQUIRED: mugarte@interchange.ubc.ca
PUBLIC TALK: “Southern Gothic: Rosario Castellanos, Chiapas and the Monsters of Land Reform”
3-5pm
This talk approaches Rosario Castellanos’s novel Balún Canán (1957), set in 1930s Chiapas, as a literary expression of landowner paranoia on the eve of revolutionary land reform. Focusing on the many instances of magic and witchcraft in the novel—most often interpreted as markers of indigeneity or cultural hybridity — Beckman argues that these supernatural elements structure fantasies in which ladino (white) landowners imagine their own destruction by indigenous monsters. More broadly, drawing from additional examples, this talk opens onto questions of 1) the recurrence of gothic form as an expression of oligarchic decline; 2) indigenous magic as a register of the uneven and combined development of the latifundia system in twentieth-century Latin America.
Everyone welcome, no RSVP required.