The Latin America and the Global research group is inviting the academic community concerned with the culture and economy of development in the Global South to join us in this exciting day of activities offered by Dr. Ericka Beckman, Associate Professor in Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
WORKSHOP: “Unfinished Transitions: The Dialectics of Rural Modernization in Latin American Fiction”
April 8, 2016, 12-2pm
Boardroom, Liu Institute for Global Issues
In this workshop, participants will discuss Dr. Beckman’s more recent article, which has been accepted by the journal Modernism/Modernity and is still in the editing stage. This essay explores how two key works of mid-twentieth-century fiction registered the uneven and contradictory dynamics of rural modernization in Latin America. While it remains commonplace to associate the rural with tradition and/or backwardness, this essay explores how Latin American fiction envisioned rural spaces as sites of particularly violent processes of modernization in their own right. In Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955) and José Donoso’s El lugar sin límites (1966), Beckman shows, modernization is figured as a kind of living hell, in which rural spaces are alternately drawn into and thrown out of circuits of capital accumulation at different moments of history. Drawing from these two texts, the author points to larger ways in which Latin American fiction depicted the creation and destruction of rural worlds during the long twentieth century.
Limited spots, light lunch will be served.
RSVP REQUIRED: mugarte@interchange.ubc.ca
PUBLIC TALK: “Southern Gothic: Rosario Castellanos, Chiapas and the Monsters of Land Reform”
April 8, 2016, 3-5pm
Boardroom, Liu Institute for Global Issues
This talk approaches Rosario Castellanos’s novel Balún Canán (1957), set in 1930s Chiapas, as a literary expression of landowner paranoia on the eve of revolutionary land reform. Focusing on the many instances of magic and witchcraft in the novel—most often interpreted as markers of indigeneity or cultural hybridity — Beckman argues that these supernatural elements structure fantasies in which ladino (white) landowners imagine their own destruction by indigenous monsters. More broadly, drawing from additional examples, this talk opens onto questions of 1) the recurrence of gothic form as an expression of oligarchic decline; 2) indigenous magic as a register of the uneven and combined development of the latifundia system in twentieth-century Latin America.
Everyone welcome, no RSVP required
Ericka Beckman’s work focuses on the relationship between a literary unconscious vis-à-vis national fantasies (and nightmares) of growth and modernity. Her work is centered on Latin American failed states from the long twentieth century but could easily dialogue with other historical traditions in Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and South East Asia. Her book Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age (2012) investigates the key role played by literature in imagining and interpreting the rapid transformations unleashed by Latin America’s first major wave of capitalist modernization. Using an innovative blend of literary and economic analysis to focalize her subject in a total plane of interpretation, Dr. Beckman discusses among many historical phenomena, the role of English capital in the consolidation of the Amazonian rubber boom and the unspeakable legacy of horror that accompanied such economic prosperity. She also pays special attention to the psychoanalytical state of a capitalist-entrepreneur mind gone mad due to excessive daydreaming about a total revolutionary modernization. Drawing on novels and essays from Colombian and Argentinean elites, Beckman reconfigures our ideas about regionalist and costumbrista literature as parochial inward-looking exercises on melancholy. She brings into sharp relief the uneasy complicity of literature with capital -in an era when major national crises resulted in not few literary rock stars bankruptcies and even the romantic suicide of a modernist national poet.
Organized by the Latin America and the Global research group. Supported by the Liu Institute for Global Issues, the French, Hispanic and Italian Studies Department, and Latin American Studies.
