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

Guest speaker: Dierdra Reber (Emory University, Spanish and Portuguese)

This talk will explore the ways in which animal metaphor turns up in Latin American film from the 1960s to the present in the service of denouncing neoliberalism, elitism, and socio-ecological death, and, conversely, of propounding a money-less economy of egalitarian companionship and life. This representation of the animal world as an alternative to destructive human egotism resonates with Pope Francis’s critique of “misguided anthropocentrism,” primatologist Frans de Waal’s estimation that animal empathy may yet provide a remedy for human debacle, and iconic dependency theorist Eduardo Galeano’s meditation on animal solidarity as a repository for his embattled faith in human utopia. A final coda will consider how this posthumanist counter-discourse intended to work toward capitalism’s dissolution may turn out to be entirely consonant with, and even underwritten by, the epistemological discourse of capitalism itself.

Dierda Reber is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Emory University, where she works on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American and U.S. cultural media. Her recent publications have explored affect, epistemology, and cultural politics: in addition to contributing to several book compilations and publishing articles in venues such as the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Modern Language Notes, Revista Iberoamericana, and nonsite.org, her book Coming to Our Senses: Affect and an Order of Things for Global Culture is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Professor Reber’s current book project proposes “post-neocolonialism” as the critical mode most appropriate for the cultural analysis of post-independence Latin America.

In preparation for the discussion, please read the short selections from Reber’s Coming to Our Senses, de Waal’s The Age of Empathy (the first few pages, for those pressed for time), and Galeano’s “Bichos” (available in English and Spanish). All texts can be downloaded below.

Event Sponsor:
Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures

Contact Email:
pvalderr@stanford.edu, monicavb@stanford.edu