Thursday, October 22, 2015, 4pm
Case Room, Liu Institute for Global Issues (access through the courtyard)
Juan Felipe Hernandez (French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies) will share a presentation-proposal about his current PhD research, tentatively entitled “Latin American Literature of Extraction” (details below), and then we will open up the discussion for feedback, comments, and questions about his work.
Resource extraction in what became Latin America has a long and bloody history. But that history is not complete or exhausted.
From the 1500s silver mines of Potosà to today’s “Super-Cycle” (disproportionate extraction over the past two decades), this activity has been constituent of the region’s subjectivity: from high level executives to the subaltern. This social activity has produced a rich corpus of essays, novels, poems, and cultural products that have not been analyzed from an academic perspective.
My dissertation (provisionally entitled) “Literature of Extraction in Latin America” aims at filling that gap in literary historiography. I intend to reevaluate and rethink the cultural archive that deals with natural resources; more specifically, mineral extraction in the Andean region.
Currently, I am evaluating different avenues to follow in order to produce a self-contained and comprehensive analysis.
Since resource extraction is complex and affects different aspects of life, I will narrow down the scope of the study in order to do justice to several urgent claims: social disruption, environmental destruction, indigenous extermination, women’s historical accounts, legal discourses, theoretical opportunities, etc. This wealth of possible avenues of study problematize a possible unidimensional and complicit study. Therefore, I will have to find strategies of narration and methods of constructing a work that is self reflexive, critical, and aware of its place of enunciation.