Department Sponsored Events
April 2009
Cuba and the Atlantic World: Celebrating 400 years of Espejo de paciencia
Friday, April 3
1:00pm - 4:00pm
334 Folwell Hall
An event on the cultural production and transatlantic relations between Cuba, Africa, and Spain. For more information, please contact Professor Raúl Marrero-Fente at rmarrero@umn.edu
Panelists:
- Alejandro de la Fuente, University of Pittsburgh
“Cuba and the Atlantic in the 16th century” - Juana Goergen, De Paul University
“Hibridez de la épica en Espejo de paciencia” - Raúl Marrero-Fente, University of Minnesota
“Africa and the Atlantic in Espejo de paciencia” - Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota
“On Freedom: the Problem of Pop Music Studies when it Talks about Cuba”
The Triumphal Voyage: A Novelist's Journey Through Literaray Modernism
Friday, April 10
3:00pm
134 Folwell Hall
The Triumphal Voyage (English translation by Jay Miskowiec of El viaje triunfal, and winner, 2008 National Translation Grant, Ministry of Culture of Colombia) recounts the travels of the fictional modernist poet Arnaldo Faría Utrillo during the first half of the twentieth century. From jungle pyramids to the streets of Rome and Paris, from surviving shipwrecks and earthquakes to witnessing the advent of la violencia in Colombia, the reader goes along on the adventures of this "professional foreigner."
Eduardo García Aguilar (b. Manizales, Colombia) has had a prolific literary career, including the publication of four novels, several collections of short stories and poetry, as well as book-length studies of such writers as Gabriel García Márquez, Alvaro Mutis, and Voltaire
Alumni Cine Club - "14 Kilómetros"
Wednesday, April 22
6:30pm
275 Nicholson Hall
MOVIE: 14 Kilómetros directed by Gerardo Olivares (2007). Seminci, 2007:Espiga de Oro: Best Picture, Best Cinematography, Best Music / Documentary
RSVP to spanport@umn.edu
Click here to watch the trailer on YouTube
Political Scientists and sociologists agree that immigration is the biggest problem that the West will face in the twenty-first century. "14 kilometers" is the distance that separates Africa from Europe by the Straits of Gibraltar. In Africa there are millions of people whose sole aim is to enter Europe because hunger does not understand boundaries or barriers. This feature would bring some light to the shadows of immigration. From the hand of Buba Kanou, Violet Sunny and Mukela Kanou, we will know a little bit more about the reality of Africa and, with them, we will take a long and dangerous journey to Europe, through Mali, Niger, Algeria and Morocco.
The movie is 95 minutes long and includes subtitles. There will be a discussion following the movie.
Popcorn & Soda will be served.
International Symposium on Popular Music Studies: African Musics of the Portuguese- and French-Speaking Worlds
Thursday, Friday, and Monday April 23, 24 & 27, 2009
Link to Program (in .pdf format)
Link to Poster (in .pdf format)
FREE and open to the Public!!
Schedule of Events: (click on titles to learn more about each event)
- Thursday, April 23, 7:30pm - Film Screening of "Fados" - Walker Art Center [Free]
- Friday, April 24, 8:45am-6:30pm - Panels, Speakers, reception (.pdf file) - 100 University International Center (331 17th Ave. SE. click here for map)
- Friday, April 24, 8:00pm - Carmen Souza in Concert - Cedar Cultural Center
- Monday, April 27, 4:00pm -"Jazz Transatlantic" Lecture by Gerhard Kubik, Universität Wien - 125 Nolte Center
Popular Music Studies has now consolidated itself as an established multidisciplinary field, particularly in the Anglophone academy. In the cultures that are the focus of this symposium Popular Music Studies still remains a marginal field. Yet, this field has proven to be particularly fertile in the realm of knowledge production as it actively engages a wide spectrum of disciplines, media, and thematic areas such as musicology, political economy, cultural studies, history, globalization, critical theory, national identity formations, literary studies, digital media, translocal diasporic identities, race and ethnicity, visual culture, gender and sexuality, performance studies, as well as pedagogy, among others.
The aims of this symposium are manifold: (1) to showcase cutting edge scholarly work in the field of Popular Music Studies focusing on musical cultures that are less well-known in today’s Anglophone-dominated globalized world and that are rarely in dialogue with one another; (2) to critically explore the multidimensional role of Africa or the Black Atlantic as major reference points in the historical formation of musical cultures in the Lusophone and Francophone worlds; (3) to enhance the academic life of the university with an international event that highlights a very dynamic and lively field of scholarly inquiry that intersects with popular culture, where there are a number of faculty and graduate students in CLA pursuing research projects; (4) to involve the community at large by organizing, together with the symposium, a film session on Portuguese popular music at the Walker Art Center (Fados [2007] by Spanish director Carlos Saura) and a concert at the Cedar Cultural Center (Carmen Souza [Cape Verde/Portugal]); (5) to collaborate with departments across the University of Minnesota campus, as well as other colleges in the Twin Cities area through active participation and attendance to the events.
Violence and Culture in Contemporary Brazil
Thursday, April 30
3:30pm - 5:00pm
38 Folwell Hall
This lecture will explore how social violence has been interrogated in debates around culture and aesthetics. More specifically, we will focus on a variety of cultural and historical topics related to Brazil in the realm of film, painting, popular music, and sports, while considering the impact of institutional forces such as the military and the police. The lecture will also include comments on Brazilian writers such as Guimarães Rosa, Clarice Lispector, Caio Fernando Abreu, Renato Tapajós, and Luís Fernando Veríssimo. This lecture is based on a project entitled, "Writings on Violence," carried out by a research group involving the Universidade de São Paulo and the Universidade de Campinas, which has been sponsored by the Brazilian research foundations FAPESP and CNPq since 2006, involving scholars from different countries, as well as graduate and undergraduate students. One of the goals of this project is to evaluate how contemporary cultural production is critically engaging the phenomenon of social violence. Professor Jaime Ginzburg, from Universidade de São Paulo, is currently at the University of Minnesota on a Fulbright Foundation/CAPES fellowship and is teaching a course on Brazilian Culture (PORT 5530).
October 2008
“From One Body to Another”: Ana Clavel and Jay Miskowiec in dialogue on the collaboration of novelist and literary translator.
Thursday October 9
4:00 p.m.
140 Nolte Hall (map)
Free and open to the public
On the occasion of the publication of Shipwrecked Body, the English translation of Cuerpo naúgrago, award-winning Mexican author Ana Clavel and translator/publisher Jay Miskowiec will engage in a lively dialogue on their collaboration, the nature of literary translation from Spanish to English, and the current literary scene in Mexico. Of particular interest will be the challenges of “translating gender” between the two languages in a novel whose topic is the physical transformation of a women into a man (a deliberate play on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando) and the subsequent exploration of gender, sexuality, desire, in the urban landscape of bars, bathrooms, saunas, art galleries, apartments, and streets of Mexico City. Whereas the Spanish play of adjectives and pronouns can dramatize the tension between the linguistic gender of a person and that person’s physiology and gender presentation, in English this central dimension of the novel must be communicated by other means. How did the two collaborate in the creative act of translation? http://www.anaclavel.com/
Ana Clavel (Mexico City, 1961-) is the author of the novels Las violetas son flores de deseo (Alfaguara, 2008) awarded the 2005 Prix Juan Rulfo sponsored by Radio France Internationale; Cuerpo naúfrago and Los deseos y su sombra, (published by Aliform Publishing as Shipwrecked Body and Desire and its Shadow) and the collections of short stories Paraísos trémulos, Amorosos de atar, and Fuera de escena. Clavel has won numerous grants and prizes for her writing, including a silver medal from the Société Académique Arts-Sciences-Lettres in Paris. She was a finalist for the Premio Internacional Alfaguara de Novela (2006).
Jay Miskowiec received his BA in Spanish and English from the University of Minnesota and his MA and PhD in Comparative Literature from the City University of New York, under the direction of Gregory Rabassa. Miskowiec is director and translation editor of Aliform Publishing in Minneapolis. He has received translation grants from the Ministry of Culture of Brazil, the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes of México, the Instituto para la Cultura y las Artes in Argentina, and most recently the Colombian Ministry of Culture. He is the translator of Ana Clavel's novels Shipwrecked Body and Desire and Its Shadow.
SHIPWRECKED BODY (Cuerpo naúfrago) Antonia wakes up one morning a man, or at least in the body of one. Is identity more than skin deep? Does sexuality begin with desire? Set against the backdrop of downtown Mexico City, 'Shipwrecked Body relates the out-of-body experiences of a woman in a most masculine world. "Clavel explores masculine desire through the total transgression of the body." Confabulario
Sponsored by The Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
June 2008
"Cine Club" Film: "El viaje de Carol"
Tuesday, June 24
6:00 p.m.
Room 155 Nicholson Hall
We will view and discuss the 2002 movie entitled "El viaje de Carol" ("Carol's Journey"), by Spanish film director Imanol Uribe. You are all welcome to view the movie on your own before the "Cine Club" session (it is available from Blockbuster, Netflix, etc), but we will be viewing the movie together on June 24. You can see the trailer for the movie online on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8cgU3bkUI8
Pizza and beverages will be served.
We will also discuss the article entitled "The Rupture of the World and the Conflict of Memories," about the exhumations of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War in Spain in the last few years. Please read it if you are interested (click on the title of the article to download a .pdf copy of the article). It will be part of our post-movie discussion (but don't worry, there is no grade for this activity!).
The discussion for this first session of the Department's ?Cine Club? will be led by Professors Ofelia Ferrán and Maria Antonia Calvo. Please send the Department (spanport@umn.edu) an email or call 612-625-5858 by next Friday, June 20, if you plan to attend the event so we can order the food. We hope to see many of you on June 24!