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Five College LAS Events and Announcements

Wednesday, May 7, 2008
"TECHNOFUTUROS: Critical Interventions in Latina/o Studies"

a reading & booksigning with editor Agustin Laó-Montes, local contributors and an introduction by Dr. Sonia Alvarez

TIME: 7:00PM
LOCATION: Food for Thought Books, downtown Amherst

Technofuturos, edited by Nancy Raquel Mirabal and Agustin Laó-Montes, challenges the conventional notions of Latina/o identities, histories, and cultures by historicizing and differentiating the multiple discourses of Latinidad. Contributing scholars of literature and Latina/o culture destabilize and reassess their understanding of Latinidades during a period of accelerated globalization, transnationalism, transmodernity, and reconfigurations of empire. Their topics include disidentificatory feminism in El Mundo Zurdo, Latinas as transnational mothers and care-givers, and technological choice and the Spanish option in post-9/11 America. Four of the 17 essays are reprinted from journal publication.By analyzing the discursive, performative, and aesthetic dimensions of knowledge, this book contests and reconstructs Latina/o studies. Local contributors will include Isabel Espinal, Esther Cuesta, Erika Marquez, and Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez, among others.

Sonia Alvarez is a Leonard J. Horwitz Professor of Latin American Politics and Studies and the director of the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of Engendering Democracy in Brazil: Women's Movements in Transition Politics (1990); and co-editor of The Making of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity, Strategy, and Democracy (1992) and Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures: Re-visioning Latin American Social Movements (1998). Before coming to UMass, Alvarez was Professor of Politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In Brazil, she has been Fulbright visiting professor in the Department of Political Science and the Inter-Disciplinary Graduate Program in Social Sciences at the State University of Campinas and visiting scholars at the Center for Philosophy and Human Sciences at the Federal University of Santa Catarina.

Agustin Laó-Montes teaches sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he is also affiliated with the Latino/American and Caribbean Studies and with Afro-American Studies. Using a world-historical perspective, he has published widely in a diversity of subjects including cultural globalization and political economies, social movements, world cities, decolonial critique, and Afro-Latino cultures and politics. He defines himself as a long-term activist-intellectual.

Esther Cuesta is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts. Her research focuses on the representation and self-representation of pluricultural Andean diasporas in the European Union. A native of Guayaquil, the largest city of Ecuador, Ms. Cuesta migrated to the United States at the age of 19. In her theoretical testimonial "Guayaquileña (in)documentada: One-way Ticket to My Diaspora(s): A Testimonio," Ms. Cuesta invites us to rethink about invisibilized Latino populations in the U.S., as well as about exile and self-exile that goes beyond the nation-state.

Isabel Espinal is a librarian at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, specializing in anthropology, Afro-American Studies, and Native American Indian Studies. She is currently a doctoral student in American Studies at the University of Massachusetts. She has published in the field of librarianship and Latino Studies and has published poetry Callaloo, the anthology Tertuliando/Hanging Out: Dominicanas & Amiga(o)s/Dominican Women & Friends, and the loose-leaf chapbook Clean Sheet.

Erika Marquez is a Ph.D. student in sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She earned a master's degree in criminology at Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona in Spain and a law degree from the Universidad Externado de Colombia. Her research work includes issues of social control ranging from sexuality and immigration to the logics of the penal code.

Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez is Professor of Spanish and U.S. Latina/o literature at Mount Holyoke College since 1983. He is both a cultural critic and a creative writer. His bilingual book of poetry New York Backstage/Nueva York Tras Bastidores (Cuarto Propio, 1993) was published in Chile. He is the author of José Can You See?: Latinos On and Off Broadway (The University of Wisconsin Press, 1999) and co-editor of Puro Teatro: A Latina Anthology (The University of Arizona Press, 2000, in collaboration with Nancy S. Sternbach from Smith College); followed by a critical study, Stages of Life: Transcultural Performance and Identity in Latina Theatre also in collaboration with Sternbach (Arizona, 2001). His present research and scholarship center on the staging of monstrosity, enfreakment, queerness, and abjection on Broadway and minority theatre. He is also working on trauma, memory, death, and mourning in U.S. Latina/o theatre and performance.

Food For Thought Books is a worker owned, collectively run, not-for-profit bookstore located in downtown Amherst since 1976. We specialize in hand-picked books, author readings, community events and all manner of nourishment for the heart and mind.

Thursday, May 8, 2008
"Brazilian Public Health Policy for Native Populations: 'Differentiated Attention' and the Integration of Traditional Medicine"

a talk by Esther Jean Langdon, Professor, Department of Anthropology, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil

TIME: 7:30PM
LOCATION: 601 Herter Hall, UMass

Free and Open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.

Monday, May 12, 2008
"Staging the Incas in Bourbon Lima"

a lecture by Maria S. Barbon, Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, UMass

TIME: 4:00pm
LOCATION: Thompson 519, UMass

All lectures are free and open to to the public.

Visit our website.

Monday, May 12, 2008
The Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies--UMass--End-of-the-Semester Gathering

TIME: 5:30pm
LOCATION: Thompson 519, UMass

Light refreshments will be served.

Immediately following our last colloquium, with Maria S. Barbon, "Staging the Incas in Bourbon Lima" (4:00PM, Thompson 519).

Friday, May 16, 2008
"The Hospitable US Transacting Hemispheric Agency, Human Rights and Border Epistemologies"

TIME: 9:00am - 5:00pm
LOCATION: School of Business 321, University of Connecticut at Storrs

Concluding a yearlong, faculty seminar on the topic of hemispheric rights, agency, and border epistemologies, this interdisciplinary colloquium will reflect upon paradigms of citizenship, nationhood, and gender, and bolster correlative dialogues on human rights and political agency.

SCHEDULE:
9:30-12:00: Sites of Agency and Rights in the Americas (panel)
2:00-3:30: New Border Epistemologies (panel)
4:00-5:30: Toward a Hemispheric Rights and Agency Project (Round table)

PARTICIPANTS:
Sonia Álvarez (Leonard J. Horwitz Professor of Latin American Politics and Studies, UMass—Amherst).

Mari Castañeda (Communication, UMass—Amherst).

Jorge Duany (Anthropology, U de Puerto Rico).

Licia Fiol Matta (Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies, Lehman College).

Agustín Laó Montes (Sociology, UMass—Amherst).

Walter Mignolo (William H. Wannamaker Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies at Duke).

Stephen J. Pitti (History/American Studies, Yale).

Alicia Schmidt Camacho (American Studies/Ethnicity, Race at Migration, Yale).

Kornel S. Chang (History/Asian American Studies, UConn).

Odette Casamayor Cisneros (Modern and Classical Languages/Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at UConn).

Manisha Desai (Sociology/Women’s Studies, UConn).

Guillermo Irizarry (Spanish/Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, UConn).

Jacqueline Loss (Modern and Classical Languages, UConn).

Samuel Martínez (Anthropology, UConn).

Mark Overmyer Velázquez (History, UConn).

Diana Ríos (Communication, UConn).

Blanca G. Silvestrini (History, UConn).

Richard Wilson (Gladstein Professor of Human Rights, UConn).

Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh (Political Science, UConn).

Sponsored by The Human Rights Institute, the Puerto Rican and Latino Studies Institute, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the Office of Multicultural and International Affairs at the University of Connecticut.

For more information or to confirm attendance, visit web.uconn.edu/prls/conf08.htm or call 860.486.3997