Upcoming Events

Nov
20

Faculty Fellow Talk:
Dr. Pavel Andrade
(Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures)
"An Abolished Past and Future: Rosario Castellanos and the Struggle with Realism"

This presentation turns to Rosario Castellanos’ The Book of Lamentations (1962) as a novel that, in its struggle with realism, broaches the question of Latin America’s capitalist temporalities. By recounting the series of events leading to an indigenous rebellion in the Chiapas highlands, Castellanos’ novel explores the interrelated problems of class rule, exploitation, gender oppression, indigenous land rights, and agrarian reform in post-revolutionary Mexico. The novel’s temporal opacity has motivated all manner of historicist inspection, a patrolling of the limits between fact and fiction that would, once settled, commit both novel and author to a particular ideological orientation. Arguing in a different direction, I propose to read Castellanos’ modern epic as a formal interrogation of Latin America’s capitalist temporalities. I argue that The Book of Lamentations’ struggle with realism registers the temporal dynamics of capitalist transition in Latin America.

4pm, Humanities Building Room 108.