Newsletter
The following two new publications from the "Afrontar las crisis desde América Latina" collection will be presented at the Guadalajara International Book Fair:
1) Gerardo Gutiérrez Cham: Narrativas de exesclavizados afroamericanos. Conflictos de autoría, CALAS/Editorial Universidad de Guadalajara, November 2022.
Presenter: Patricia Córdova Abundis
Abstract: The central topic of this essay is the conflict unleashed by the authorship of autobiographies written by enslaved people of African descent during the 18th and 19th centuries in the Americas. The book deals with the cases of four authors whose testimonial narratives have been widely disseminated since they were published: Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Juan Francisco Manzano and Mahomma Gardo Baquaqua. The book analyzes the fact that, for centuries, the use of the "I", as the author's referential voice, was a privileged entity, elaborated by the protagonists themselves through printed accounts. It was also taken for granted that the rest of lives only deserved to remain confined to strictly private spheres because they were considered empty, vulgar, irrelevant, and not worthy of broader public attention.
The author: Gerardo Cham holds a PhD in Discourse Analysis from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. He has been founding co-director of the Centro María Sibylla Merian de Estudios Latinoamericanos Avanzados (CALAS). He works as a full professor at the University of Guadalajara. His research work focuses on issues of racism, violence, discrimination and power in narratives of and about people of African descent, especially in Latin America. He is a member of SNI, level II. As a writer, he has published six novels.
2. Bruno López Petzoldt: Recordar para perdurar. La participación del cine en la reparación de experiencias traumáticas. CALAS/Editorial Universidad de Guadalajara, noviembre 2022.
Presenter: Yolanda Minerva Campos
Abstract: Film constitutes a powerful cultural tool that operates in multiple ways in the rescue of memories, as well as in the collective reparation and interdisciplinary conceptualization of traumatic experiences in communities devastated by systematic violations of their fundamental rights. It examines and makes perceptible the extensions of silenced or legitimized political violence both in the individual and in the social fabric upset by disturbing marks that thwart existence and coexistence. Cinematographic works do not only refer to the yesterday but, above all, question the conventional patterns used to articulate past, present and future in order to explore possible horizons. As detonators of memory and generators of consciousness, they strengthen different modi memorandi that deal with the still highly active violent past.
the autor: Bruno López Petzoldt holds a PhD in philology and film studies from the University of Hamburg in Germany. His fields of work include theories of film and literature, memory studies and intermediality. He was a lecturer and researcher at the Institute of Romance Philologies and the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Hamburg. He was also a visiting professor at the Hamburg Film and Media Academy and a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) scholar in Argentina and Brazil. He is currently a research professor at the Latin American Institute of Art, Culture and History of the Federal University of Latin American Integration in Brazil.
The presentations will take place on November 29, from 7:30 to 8:20 p.m. in Hall F of the international area of the FIL. Access is free.