2017 Latin American, Latino, and Iberian Studies Association (LALISA) Conference
Save-the-date for this conference, which is being cosponsored by the Latin American Studies Program and the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies.
http://las.uoregon.edu/2016/12/12/2nd-lalisa-conference-april-13-15/
Peripheral Mappings: Social and Cultural Geographies from the Underside of Modernity
From Catalonia to California, Cuba, Chile, to all the many areas impacted by the long Iberian expansion that started in the 15th century, the foundational divisions of center and periphery have constituted cultural and social spaces where languages, bodies, ethnicities, and alternate mappings have resisted colonial hegemonic practices and institutions. According to Mexican philosopher Leopoldo Zea (1912-2004) the peripheral mappings within which Spain and Portugal were placed in the early modern period positioned their colonial territories at “the periphery of a periphery.” Decolonial movements and theoretical discussions have critically revisited the concept of periphery and problematized the discussion with new terms such as Gloria Anzaldúa’s “nepantilism” (“being between crossroads”) and her post-binary discussion of mestizo/a identities. Following on the fruitful discussions of our inaugural conference at Reed College in the spring of 2016, our Second Conference of LALISA at the University of Oregon aims to investigate the validity and contemporary currency of the center-periphery model as a way to understand Latin American, Latino/a, and Iberian cultural productions and social formations. We expect to receive papers from various disciplines across the humanities and the social sciences that will deal with issues related to the central themes of the conference.
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Jill Robbins is Professor and Dean of the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Art at the University of California, Merced. She is the author of two monographic books, Crossing Through Chueca: Lesbian Literary Culture in Queer Madrid (2011) and Frames of Referents: The Postmodern Poetry of Guillermo Carnero (1997). She has published numerous articles and book chapters about poetry, film, narrative, celebrity activism, and the book industry. She received a fellowship in December 2015 from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a single-authored book about poetry, violence, and trauma in relation to the March 11, 2004 train bombings in Madrid, tentatively titled, We Were All on those Trains: The Poetry of 11-M.
Enrique Dussel was born in Argentina and he first came to Mexico in 1975 as a political exile, he is currently a Mexican citizen, Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Iztapalapa campus of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) and also teaches courses at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He has Doctorate degrees from the Complutense University of Madrid, and the Sorbonne in Paris. He has been awarded Doctorates Honoris Causa from the University of Friburg in Switzerland, the University of San Andrés in Bolivia, the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina, the University of Santo Tomás de Aquino in Colombia, and the National University of General San Martin in Argentina. He is the founder with others of the movement referred to as the Philosophy of Liberation, and his work is concentrated in the field of Ethics and Political Philosophy.
Arturo Arias is a Guatemalan novelist and critic, who is a professor of 20th-century Spanish-American Literature at the University of California, Merced. He has taught courses specializing in: Central American literature; Indigenous literatures; social and critical theory; race, gender and sexuality in post-colonial societies; cultural studies, and ethnographic approaches. Arias has previously taught at San Francisco State University and the University of Redlands in Southern California, and he is a past president of the Latin American Studies Association. Arias holds a PhD in Sociology of Literature, from L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes Paris, France. (1978) He has published seven novels and four academic books. He received the Casa de las Américas prize for his novel Itzam Na (1981), the Anna Seghers award for his novel Jaguar en llamas 1990), and the Casa de las Américas prize in essay for his book Ideología, Literatura y Sociedad durante the Revolución Guatemalteca, 1944-1954 (1979). His most recent novel is Arias de Don Giovanni (FyG Editores, 2010).