Organized by Anna More and Maite Zubiaurre
About this UCLA Working Group
Despite a strong theoretical and critical tradition, Latin American and Peninsular Iberian scholarship has suffered from academic isolationism. Demographics have created a self-sufficient market in U.S. academia, at the same time isolating Luso-Hispanic studies while indicating their importance for our geopolitical context. This working group proposes to address this problem by creating an interdisciplinary and comparative structure to discuss theoretical issues in Iberian and Latin American Studies. The goal of the group is twofold: to emphasize a critical tradition of studies of Latin America and Peninsular Iberia and to give visibility and access to this scholarship to the greater academic community through readings, speakers and publications.
During the 2005-2006 academic year the group will focus on three theoretical areas of interest: colonialism and post-colonialism, aesthetics and modernity, and gender and cultural memory. These theoretical areas are intended to engage the conditions and effects of a “divergent modernity” in Iberia and Latin America. The foundations of this modernity can be traced to the nature of early European expansion and colonialism, which was pre-Enlightenment and pre-industrial and based on religious ideas of conversion and social incorporation. Since independence, Iberia and Latin America have experienced recurring authoritarian and religious traditionalism as well as a hybrid economic and political modernity, including peristent cultural nationalisms. These conditions in turn have affected areas such as gender and sexuality, cultural and political democratization, and industrial and post-industrial conditions as well as post-modern consumerism, aesthetics and mass culture.
The particular development of a “divergent modernity” and the resulting cultural hybridity of Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula create specific challenges for Luso-Hispanic scholarship but also provide its strongest points of comparative interest and theoretical debate. The invited speakers for the 2005-2006 academic year are all outstanding examples of how critical thought emerging from this context has provided a privileged position from which to critique standard accounts of globalization and modernization.
In addition to a public lecture, some speakers will also conduct small group seminars on selected readings. Please contact the organizers (amore@humnet.ucla.edu or zubiaurre@ucla.edu) if you would like to participate in these seminars.