May 4, 2023
10 am-6 pm
GLAS 311
View the schedule below

This symposium will bring together early career scholars engaged in cutting-edge work on Latin American literature, art, thought, and culture to consider the relationship between environmental, cultural, national, and historical contexts and engage with the Texas A&M Community.

Panelists:

Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez, University of North Texas
Title: Why is the World so Beautiful? Robin Wall Kimmerer and Édouard Glissant on Aesthetic, Environmental Resistance
Bio: Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez (he/they) is currently the Assistant Professor in the Philosophy and Religion Department at the University of North Texas and will join the Philosophy Department at the University of Oregon in the Fall of 2023. His research and teaching approximate the intersection between Latin American/Africana decolonial philosophy that occurs in the Americas, and how this entanglement contributes to understanding gender-race constructions under coloniality as well as the relations between colonized communities across the continent. The main sources for these investigations are political and aesthetic theories and practices that critique colonial forms of self-understanding and expression and contribute to new epistemologies of resistance. Miguel is currently working on two book projects, Decolonial Aesthetics: Theory and Praxis from the Americas (under contract with Indiana University Press), and Fundamentals of Anti-Blackness in Latin American Thought.

Carlos Colmenares Gil, University of Indiana, Bloomington
Title: No Metaphors for the Country: the Anti-Landscape of Igor Barreto
Bio: Carlos Colmenares Gil’s work is concerned with the relationship between Latin American Thought (broadly understood) and continental philosophy, anthropology, and psychoanalysis. His main geographical areas of research are the continental Caribbean and Brazil. Currently, he is working on a project focused on poetry, landscape, and class in contemporary Venezuela where he studies the work of Igor Barreto, Yolanda Pantin, and Armando Reverón, among others. He is also articulating a second project on experimental novels and private life in Brazil and Venezuela in the twentieth century.

Noraeden Mora Mendez, University of Southern California
Title: In Spite of Catachresis: to Think For/From the Place We Call Venezuela
Bio: Noraedén Mora Méndez is a doctoral candidate in the Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture program (Comparative Literature track) at USC. She completed undergraduate studies in Psychology (UCAB), and Psychoanalytic training (UCV), in Caracas, Venezuela; holds an MA in Cultural and Critical Studies from Birkbeck, University of London. Her interests broadly include the intersections between philosophy, literature, and visuality, with a focus on Latin America and specifically on Venezuela. Her approach is transdisciplinary and investigates experimental artworks and writings that cross the borders between genres, languages, media, and/or disciplines. Her doctoral dissertation “Untimely Passages: Experiments in Venezuelan Literary and Visual Culture” explores experimental or marginal arts to think about Venezuela nonlinearly and pose a larger question about spatiotemporality, identity, and history. She has published articles in Spanish and English about cinema, art, translation, and literature. She has published non-academic texts in Latin American and German magazines, is co-editor of the independent press Flores degenerades (based in LA and Berlin), and co-authored manifesto degenerado published in 2022.

Carolina Díaz, Wesleyan University
Title: “The Book of Memory”: The Atacama Desert and Air’s Entanglements.
Bio: Carolina A. Díaz works at the intersection of ecology and Latin American culture, in particular, Contemporary Chilean art, history, and politics from Pinochet’s dictatorship era onwards. Her current book project “Coexisting with the Elements: Chile’s Ecological Imagination” is a feminist, decolonial, and materialist exploration of aesthetic practices which propose a different modality of being in the world with humans and more-than-human others. She recasts the figure of the elemental roots, -earth, water, fire, and earth- as fields of meaning with which to read what she conceives as a historical continuum of unacknowledged violence against marked bodies and against more-than-human others, sentient and otherwise. She is an assistant professor in the Romance Languages and Literatures Department, Latin American Studies, and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Revista Iberoamericana, Chasqui, Estudios de Género, A Contracorriente, The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and Doing Transdisciplinary Feminism: Re-working Theory, Method, and Practice.

Schedule

10:00 am - breakfast, coffee, introductory remarks

10:30 am - 11:45 - Carolina Díaz
Title: “The Book of Memory”: The Atacama Desert and Air’s Entanglements
Respondent: Ege Selin Islekel (TAMU Philosophy)

12:00 - 1:15 - Carlos Colmenares Gil
Title: No Metaphors for the Country: the Anti-Landscape of Igor Barreto
Respondent: Adam Rosenthal (TAMU GLAC)

1:15 - 2:30 lunch

2:45 - 4:00 - Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez
Title: Why is the World so Beautiful? Robin Wall Kimmerer and Édouard Glissant on Aesthetic, Environmental Resistance
Respondent: Don Deere (TAMU Philosophy)

4:15 - 5:30 - Noraeden Mora Méndez
Title: In Spite of Catachresis: to Think For/From the Place We Call Venezuela
Respondent: Maddalena Cerrato (Bush School, International Affairs)

The Texas A&M community is invited to participate in the Glasscock Center’s Spring 2023 hybrid reading group, Latinx and Latin American Environmentalisms. This monthly series is focused around emerging scholarship on Latinx and Latin American approaches to environmental problems. Participation is free and open to the public.

Zoom details (recurring meeting):
Meeting ID: 967 7526 6983
Zoom link

View further details of the series here.

March 8, 2023 6pm 
GLAS 311

Gather is an intimate portrait of the growing movement amongst Native Americans to reclaim their spiritual, political and cultural identities through food sovereignty, while battling the trauma of centuries of genocide.

Gather follows Nephi Craig, a chef from the White Mountain Apache Nation (Arizona), opening an indigenous café as a nutritional recovery clinic; Elsie Dubray, a young scientist from the Cheyenne River Sioux Nation (South Dakota), conducting landmark studies on bison; and the Ancestral Guard, a group of environmental activists from the Yurok Nation (Northern California), trying to save the Klamath river.

Gather film screening co-sponsored with Indigenous Studies Working Group

Wednesday, October 12, 2022
11AM - 1PM
GLAS 311

Free and open to the public
Registration is appreciated
Lunch will be provided

Description: Williston Chase is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at UC Irvine. Working between Latin American Studies, Black Studies, and European intellectual history, he researches the philosophical legacy of the transatlantic slave trade in the Americas. He is the co-director of University and State, a research cluster in the Humanities Center at UCI, and co-PI of a project on Latin American poststructuralism at the Instituto de Filosofía, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso in Chile, where he was a Fulbright scholar in 2021-2022. His talk will draw on his dissertation, “Institutional Alibis: Chilean Letrados, Black Study, and the Stakes of Thinking,” in which he reads the statesmen and administrators often presumed to establish and safeguard an exceptional institutional order in 19th century Chile through theories of historical possibility in Black Studies, thus unfurling the epistemological (mis)adventures of these progressive lettered elites and staging the problematic historicity of racial slavery in the Southern Cone at the limits of Latin American republican thought.

Guest lecturers:
Williston Chase
ABD, Comparative Literature UCI
Fulbright scholar 2021-22, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso

Alberto Moreiras
Professor of Hispanic Studies
TAMU

Event Poster

Free and open to the public
Limited seating | Registration required
Meal provided

September 21, 2022

6:00 - 9:00 PM
The Queen Theatre
110 S Main St, Bryan TX

Filmmaker Patricio Guzmán’s latest documentary explores how the Andes have shaped the culture and lives of Chileans who live between the mountains and the sea. The impact of the 1973-1990 dictatorship on the artists and writers interviewed in the film also looms over contemporary Chilean politics, and makes the film a study in the topography of memory.

Facilitator: Dr. Don Deere, Visiting Assistant Professor | Philosophy
Don T. Deere is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Philosophy Department and Visiting Scholar in the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for the Humanities at Texas A&M University. His work centers on Latin American and Latinx Philosophy, Decolonial Thought, and Continental Philosophy. His book, The Invention of Order: On the Coloniality of Space, is forthcoming with Duke University Press.

Watch the film's trailer