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

Guest speaker: Gabriel Giorgi (NYU, Spanish and Portuguese)

Brazilian writer Guimarães Rosa’s text “Meu tio o iauaretê” (“My Uncle the Jaguar,” ca. 1950) is a turning point in the cultural reflection about the relation of animality and politics in South America: it marks the disappearance of “wild life” as well as the forms of its returns or hauntings. Staging an alliance between human and animal, the text displaces the forms of individuality or individuation that shape the nationalized bodies/subject, illuminates new registers of sense in language — and thus an alternative politics of the literary — and mobilizes the demarcations of the “natural.” Guimarães Rosa’s text, in this sense, provides tools to think the ways that culture interrogates its solidarity with the humanist and civilizing traditions that shaped Latin American modernities.

Gabriel Giorgi is an Associate Professor in NYU’s Spanish and Portuguese Department. His work focuses on Southern Cone literature by authors such as Bolaño and Lamborghini, as well as major areas of critical theory (specifically biopolitics, queer theory, and gender studies). He has most recently published a monograph on the intersection of animality, culture, and biopolitics — Formas comunes: Animalidad, cultura, biopolítica (2014) — a culmination of his years of research in the field.