Conference
(Des)articulaciones
October 9-10, 2009
(Des)articulaciones Mission Statement
The Graduate Students of the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh organize a biennial conference to reflect on Latin American and Caribbean aesthetic production from alternate points of enunciation. The conference’s founding committee advocated for an event with no participation fees and provided a temporary roommate system to provide housing for the conference participants.
Keynote Speaker
Mayra Santos-Febres
Universidad de Puerto Rico
Visit her Blog
2009 Call for papers
des)articulaciones in/with Latin American and Caribbean Cultural Processes: Memory and Transgression MEMORY AND TRANSGRESSION October 9-10, 2009
We invite papers across disciplines that explore intersections between memory/transgression and the following topics:
- Self-writing
- Migrations, exiles, displacements
- Transatlantic studies
- Maps, cartography, geography
- Nation, community, citizenship
- Multiculturalism and globalization
- Margins and contested spaces
- Race, internal colonization, (de)whitening
- Identity/body: sexuality, gender, masculinity
- Biopolitics and marginalization
- Religion/spirituality, rituals/performance
- Trauma and healing
Individual or panel proposals (3 participants) may be in Spanish, Portuguese, or English. Presentations are limited to 15 minutes each. Include the title of the presentation, your name/s, institutional affiliation, address, e-mail address, and phone number in your proposal document. Please submit a 250-word abstract in Microsoft Word format to: des.articulaciones@gmail.com by May 15, 2009.
Past Conferences
(des)articulaciones in October 2007
The first biennial Graduate Student Conference followed two primary thematic avenues: Narratives and the (Im)possibility of the Nation-State (the “traditional” nation vis-à-vis its formulation through “pluri-societal” structures; migration, transit, and border narratives; the “new Latin American Left”; problems of drug-trafficking and violence.); and Shifting Identities/Subjectivities in Latin America and the Caribbean (narrating and representing in gendered textualities—queer, feminism, masculinity; ethnic representations and racial definitions; generational/ temporal conflicts and confluences).
Fifteen papers spread out over five panels: Identity, Sexuality, and Race (I and II); Voices and Resistances; The (im)possibility of the Nation-State; Urban Spaces and (im)migrations. The panelists came from a wide array of institutions (Berkeley, New York University, University of Puerto Rico, University of Peru, SUNY at Buffalo, UCLA) and different departments at the University of Pittsburgh (mainly Communications and Hispanic Literatures.) Graduate students from different departments, as well as a large number of faculty members from the Hispanic Languages and Literatures Department, attended each panel and provided for constructive feedback and discussion.
The conference opened up interdisciplinary doors with a film projection of a documentary on Colombian news representations, Los noticieros de la televisión: imagen y memoria de un país, created and produced by HL&L graduate student Fabio López de la Roche, and, to continue in the Colombian vein, the projection and discussion of the acclaimed 2003 film La combra del caminante. Both attracted undergraduate students.
Debora Castillo’s Keynote also attracted an audience outside of the graduate programs. Debra A. Castillo, the Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, Emerson Hinchliff Professor of Hispanic Studies, and Professor of Romance Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University, both of which attracted a substantial audience outside of the graduate programs and the academia, and provoked an interdisciplinary discussion on theoretical issues that pertain to discourses of the Global South.