Latin American Studies
Events and Co-Sponsored Events
Dixa Ramirez "Insolence, Indolence, and Blackness in Hispaniola" May 10th, 2023
Location: PEB 721
"Insolence, Indolence, and Blackness in Hispaniola"
In this talk, I discuss how “insolence” and “indolence” define two sides of the coin that is the figure of the free black on the island that now encompasses both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. First, I explore figure of the insolent free black through the historical case of a serial killer terrorizing the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo in the early 1790s and who became known as El Negro Incógnito (The Unknown Black). I then turn to the figure of the indolent free black through the appearance of Carrefour, a character in the 1943 film I Walked With a Zombie. Either insolent or indolent, I show how the figure of the free black on this island emerges in various cultural and historical texts as untethered to the fungible and laboring function of blackness in the Americas, occasioning horror and suspicion.
Dixa Ramírez-D’Oleo completed her PhD in Literature at UC San Diego and is currently associate professor of English at Brown University. She has published two books: Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (2018, NYU Press), which received the 2019 Barbara Christian Literary Award from the Caribbean Studies Association, and This Will Not Be Generative (2023, Cambridge University Press). She is finishing her third book, Blackness and the Photographic Negative, forthcoming from Duke University Press. Her writing has appeared in ASAP/Journal, Atlantic Studies, Avidly, The Black Scholar, Comparative Literature, Hyperallergic, Interventions, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Small Axe, and Social Text. She also serves on the Editorial Committee of Small Axe.
"Insolence, Indolence, and Blackness in Hispaniola"
In this talk, I discuss how “insolence” and “indolence” define two sides of the coin that is the figure of the free black on the island that now encompasses both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. First, I explore figure of the insolent free black through the historical case of a serial killer terrorizing the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo in the early 1790s and who became known as El Negro Incógnito (The Unknown Black). I then turn to the figure of the indolent free black through the appearance of Carrefour, a character in the 1943 film I Walked With a Zombie. Either insolent or indolent, I show how the figure of the free black on this island emerges in various cultural and historical texts as untethered to the fungible and laboring function of blackness in the Americas, occasioning horror and suspicion.
Dixa Ramírez-D’Oleo completed her PhD in Literature at UC San Diego and is currently associate professor of English at Brown University. She has published two books: Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (2018, NYU Press), which received the 2019 Barbara Christian Literary Award from the Caribbean Studies Association, and This Will Not Be Generative (2023, Cambridge University Press). She is finishing her third book, Blackness and the Photographic Negative, forthcoming from Duke University Press. Her writing has appeared in ASAP/Journal, Atlantic Studies, Avidly, The Black Scholar, Comparative Literature, Hyperallergic, Interventions, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Small Axe, and Social Text. She also serves on the Editorial Committee of Small Axe.
Christina H. Lee "Saints of Resistance. Devotions in the Philippines of Early Spanish Rule" May 4th, 2023
Christina H. Lee is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies (on leave Fall 2022) in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Professor Lee was born in South Korea and raised in Argentina. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a concentration in Latin American literature and earned a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures at Princeton in 1999. Other publications, besides Saints of Resistance: Devotions in the Philippines of Early Spanish Rule (Oxford University Press, 2021), include The Anxiety of Sameness in Early Modern Spain (Manchester University Press, 2015), The Spanish Pacific, 1521-1815: A Reader of Primary Sources with Ricardo Padrón, Amsterdam University Press, 2020), and the collection of essays Western Visions of Far East in a Transpacific Age (Routledge, 2012). In 2022, Christina Lee and Cristina Martinez-Juan (SOAS University of London) received a joint NEH/AHRC three-year grant to carry out the project “A Digital Repatriation of a Lost archive of the Spanish Pacific: The Library of The Convent of San Pablo (Manila, 1762).” This project will repatriate more than 1,500 books and manuscripts seized from the archives of the Convent of San Pablo (now the Church of San Agustin) during the British occupation of Manila, 1762 to 1764.
Christina Lee will speak about her latest book, highlighting the chapter on the devotion to Santo Niño of Cebu and its connection to the first moments of the Spanish conquest.
Flashback Friday Movie Night March 17th, 2023
Kevin Lewis O'Neil - An Island Retreat: Toward a Hemispheric History of Clerical Sexual Abuse March 16th 2023
Underwater Archeology Student Posters Exhibition March 16th, 2023
Paradoxes and Dilemmas of the Chilean Political Process: From Social Revolt to the Failed Constitutional Reform March 15th, 2023
Nature, Space, and Politics March 9th 2023
Connecting Arts-Science-History Filmmaking as Research Methos (in Spanish) March 8th 2023
Efren Olivares - My Boy Will Die of Sorrow: A Memoir of Immigration From the Front Lines March 6th 2023
Virginia Grise Artist Talk: Where the horizon meets the earth March 2nd 2023
Indigenous Film Festival Initiative February 18th 2023
2023 Graduate Student Lunch Reunion
Brazilian Election Discussion 2022
Dia De Los Muertos 2022
Oaxaca Resurgent Alan Shane Dillingham
This open-to-the-public, in-person event is presented by the departments of UC San Diego History, Ethnic Studies, Literature, and the Latin American Studies program, and with the collaboration of the Institute of the Americas.
Oaxaca Resurgent examines how Indigenous people in one of Mexico's most rebellious states shaped local and national politics during the twentieth century. Drawing on declassified surveillance documents and original ethnographic research, A. S. Dillingham traces the contested history of indigenous development and the trajectory of the Mexican government's Instituto Nacional Indigenista, the most ambitious agency of its kind in the Americas. This book shows how generations of Indigenous actors, operating from within the Mexican government while also challenging its authority, proved instrumental in democratizing the local teachers' trade union and implementing bilingual education. Focusing on the experiences of anthropologists, government bureaucrats, trade unionists, and activists, Dillingham explores the relationship between indigeneity, rural education and development, and the political radicalism of the Global Sixties.
By centering Indigenous expressions of anticolonialism, Oaxaca Resurgent offers key insights into the entangled histories of Indigenous resurgence movements and the rise of state-sponsored multiculturalism in the Americas. This revelatory book provides crucial context for understanding post-1968 Mexican history and the rise of the 2006 Oaxacan social movement.
About the author
A. S. Dillingham is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and Assistant Professor of History at Arizona State University.
STEM Plática Series (Latinx Heritage Month 2022) Chicanx Latinx Studies
October 13, 2022: (In-Person) Latinx Heritage Month 2022 STEM Plática Series Day 1 | 11:30 a.m. - 1:30 p.m. | The Latin American Studies Gildred Building Library
October 14, 2022: (In-Person) Latinx Heritage Month 2022 STEM Plática Series Day 2 | 11:30 a.m. - 1:30 p.m. | The Latin American Studies Gildred Building Library
Welcome Back Reception Chicanx Latinx Latin American Studies
Fall Quarter 2022 Reception to welcome all students, faculty & staff from Latinx Chicanx & Latin American Studies
Thank you to the Che Cafe Collective & Taco Villa!
