Valeria Meiller (Spanish and Portuguese, Georgetown)

“Matadero Modelo: Argentine Rural Modernity Seen Through The Slaughterhouse”

This work is an examination of the slaughterhouses built by the architect Francisco Salamone in the 1930s as spaces that hold valuable answers to how the meat industry helped shape a nation known worldwide for its meat production and steak culture.

Fabián Mosquera (Hispanic Languages and Literatures, Pittsburgh)

“Pasolini: Fireflies in the Synagogue of The Iconoclasts. Affective Materialism and Poetics of Community in Apocalyptic Times”

The firefly (lucciole) constitutes a powerful category within the Pasolinian critical lexicon; its intermittent light embodies the precarious but obstinate production of a political episteme by the homo/femina sacer vis à vis apocalyptic violence. In this talk Mosquera contends that Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Saint Matthew articulates a meta-cinematographic community—as we will see: a cloud of fireflies, a “synagogue of the iconoclast”—whose affective and poetic materiality prevails over the ruins of sociopolitical devastation.