PIGOTT HALL, ROOM 216
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

Guest speaker: Francine Masiello (University of California at Berkeley, Spanish and Comparative Literature)

Under authoritarian regimes of the 1970s and 80s, a focus on the “bare life” conditions of the detained and disappeared triggered a wide conversation in the arts regarding ways to represent the body in relation to sensory perception. While in Europe Foucault famously worked out a theory for biopolitics, in Latin America artists and writers began to depict the state-controlled body in its animal-like dimensions, driven by the sensation of pain. With the transition to democracy that followed decades of military rule, a different philosophical and political imperative guides the discourse on the senses: artists and writers reflect on a materiality of presence to thwart the destruction wrought by time. The visual and essayistic works of Chilean Guillermo Núñez and Brazilian Nuno Ramos register a crisis of experience that enables us to define a particular theory of reading with attention to material networks and surfaces that resist neoliberal regimes.

Francine Masiello is the Sidney and Margaret Ancker Distinguished Professor in the Humanities in the Departments of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. She works on topics related to Latin American literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, gender theory, and comparative North/South literatures. Her books include Lenguaje e ideología: las escuelas argentinas, Between Civilization and Barbarism: Women, Nation, and Literary Culture in Modern Argentina, La mujer y el espacio público: el periodismo femenino en Argentina del siglo XIX, The Art of Transition: Neoliberalism and Latin American Culture, and El cuerpo de la voz: poesía, ética y cultura. She is also co-author or co-editor of numerous volumes, most recently a book on Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman.

Event Sponsor:
Department of Comparative Literature