Cross-Border Indigenous Representation: tense and conflicting paths of "visibility”
Description
As is well known, since the earliest days of contact between the European and indigenous worlds, the indigenous world has been at the end of the 15th century, the object of cultural interest that over the centuries has evolved from an instrumental practice of representation, motivated mainly by political domination, towards various aesthetic modes of representation (literary, cinematographic, etc.) which, supported by multiple translational, rhetorical, and semiotic strategies, have contributed to the construction of a discourse of relative and complex visibility (L. Venuti) of the ingigenous world, precisely as an appropriative and counter-appropriative response not only to the framework of tensions and conflicts (cultural, political, semiotic, etc.) that this first practice of instrumental representation imposed during the early years of the Spanish conquest, but also to those that have survived to this day after the Latin American nation states deepened them in the early 19th century. In this sense, the seminar aims to critically reflect on the various strategies of intersemiotic (orality, alphabetic writing, audiovisuality) and interlinguistic (indigenous language-non-indigenous language) transfer and reformulation (R. Jakobson), both literary and cinematographic, which, within the framework of the tense and conflictive historical trajectory of political-cultural impositions and negotiations, Latin American literary and cinematographic production has used and continues to use to render the indigenous world invisible/visible, whether from the perspective of transcultural (A. Rama) or heterogeneous (Cornejo Polar) non-indigenous perspective, or as a decolonial (Mignolo, Dussel) or alternative (M. Lienhard) response from the indigenous perspective itself.
Schedule
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Speaker Bio
Mukti Lakhi Mangharam is Professor of Postcolonial Literature at Rutgers University. Her books and numerous publications explore pathways to decolonization that exceed the ideas of freedom instituted by colonial and neocolonial structures of capitalist modernity. She has published widely on postcolonial literatures and cultures in journals including ELH, Diacritics, ARIEL, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies and Safundi.
Speaker Bio
Grace Ann Miller is a PhD candidate in English at Binghamton University, specializing in American literature, Indigenous studies, and critical race theory. Her research examines how American minority literature confronts and rewrites colonial narratives through the lens of memory, genre, and storytelling. Grace also holds graduate certificates in Asian and Asian American Studies as well as in Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention.
Speaker Bio
Mitch is a second-year PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He studies 19th-century American literatures and their legacies. Informed by Indigenous studies, philosophy, ecological and queer theories, his work aims to contribute to anti-colonial practices and futures. Originally from Alaska, Mitch began learning and engaging with Lingít language and thought while working at Outer Coast College on the land of the Sheetʼká ḵwáan Tlingit.
Speaker Bio
Catherine Craft-Fairchild, Ph.D., has taught literature for over forty years, 36 of them at the University of St. Thomas where she currently serves as Associate Chair of the English department. She has book and article publications in women's studies, a long track record of innovative course development, and more recent work with OnStage (which brings actor/educators and new plays to college classrooms) and Narrative4 (which focuses on storytelling and dynamic listening).
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Liz Ann Young is a fourth-year phD student in English at Binghamton University, specializing in graphic memoirs and trauma. She is creating a thesis that is both creative and critical, focusing on feminist silences and gendered violences. She also holds a graduate certificate in Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention. Her creative work has appeared in a variety of literary journals and her poetry chapbook is also underway.
Speaker Bio
Roberto Viereck Salinas is an associate professor in the Department of Classics, Modern Languages, and Linguistics at Concordia University, Montreal. He has published several articles on the aesthetic impact of translation on Indigenous and Spanish American literature, as well as two books on contemporary Indigenous poetry. Also, he has contributed scholarly chapters to several international publications (i.e. Key Concepts in Indigenous Studies, The Cambridge History of Chilean Literature, etc.)
Speaker Bio
Pedro Lino is a PhD candidate in Latin American and Iberian Cultures at the City University of New York. His research interests include the history of nationalism in the Southern Cone, archival studies, and translation as a nexus between ideas and practices across the global North and South. He is an adjunct lecturer of Portuguese, Spanish, and Luso-African literatures at Baruch College and the City College of New York.
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Sofía R. Fernández González is a doctoral student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale. She completed her MA in Philosophy from Universidade Santiago de Compostela in 2021, and later moved to New York on a Fulbright Fellowship. As a writer, she has published Os Corpos Fráxiles (Aira Editorial, 2024) and Canícula (Edicións Laiovento, 2025).
Speaker Bio
Gastón Lillo, Associate Professor of Film and Latin American Literature, University of Ottawa. He has worked on Mexican Melodrama of the 1940s-50s and on Mexican films by Luis Buñuel. He is currently conducting research on Indigenous Representations in Latin American cinema. He has published among others: “La teta asustada de Claudia Llosa: Memoria u Olvido?” Revista de crítica latinoamericana, and “Memoria nostálgica e identidad en Y de pronto el amanecer (Chile 2017) de Silvio Caiozzi.”