Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program presents
Women, Capital, and the Environment in Amazonia: A Reading of Alberto Rangel’s Stories featuring
Javier Uriarte Assistant Professor of Spanish, Stony Brook University Wednesday, November 29, 2017, 2:55-4:20 p.m. Leo A. Guthart Cultural Center Theater Axinn Library, First Floor, South Campus
This talk focuses on Sombras n’água (Shadows in the Water, 1913), a book of short stories by Brazilian writer Alberto Rangel. Written during the period known as the Amazon Rubber Boom (1850-1920), this book constitutes a critique of the destructive power of capital. Specifically, it represents capital as interrupting and altering the harmony of the natural spaces, and it associates it with a masculine and sexual form of penetration that has concrete destructive effects in the bodies of Amazonian women, frequently represented as the victims of an uncontrolled sexual impulse, of an almost animal-like brutal drive that usually destroys the bodies, the sense of belonging, or their minds. This presentation will show how different narratives of the Rubber Boom insist on representing bodies, many times sexualized or racialized, as different forms of violence. Javier Uriarte is assistant professor of Spanish at Stony Brook University. He is the co-editor of the book Entre el humo y la niebla: Guerra y cultura en América Latina (2016), and is now finishing a second co-edited volume titled A Literary Geography of the Amazon. His first book monograph, Travel Writing, War, and the State in Latin America: The Desertmakers (forthcoming with Routledge) is a study of the effects of war in the representation of spaces, specifically during the process of modernization in the last decades of the 19th century. He is working on a second book monograph on narratives of the Rubber Boom in the Amazon. Co-sponsored by the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures For more information, please email LACS@hofstra.edu. 75348:10/17