CFP for Ring Lecture Proposals for 2024/2025:

Utopia/Heterotopia/Dystopia Theme Utopias and heterotopias cross national, regional, and cultural boundaries and inform many creative expressions in the arts, popular, social and political cultures. They drive technological, social, political and artistic innovation and negotiate horizons of hope. Although they are often based on frustration and disillusion, we ask: What lessons do they teach us about both the past and future, and how can we develop ways to effectively address adversarial positions and strengthen humanistic discourse? We look forward to proposals from diverse GSL scholars.

Special Invitation

The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art invites all faculty and students to tour the current exhibit: "Necroarchivos de las Americas. An unrelenting Search for Justice” 

Doris Salcedo’s Plegaria Muda (Silent Prayer) testifies to the resilience of life amidst uninhabitable and even impossible conditions. First envisioned by the artist as a response to gang-related deaths in Los Angeles, the installation was later informed by Salcedo’s interactions with mothers of the disappeared in Colombia.

Lecture 1: Andre Djiffack, African Dystopian Brain Drain.

The question of brain drain posed here is not new. To cite just one example on the subject among many others, George Lamming's "The Pleasure of Exile" already exposed, in 1960, the meanders of the migration of artists from Barbados to the London metropolis. Like Frantz Fanon, Lamming restores the essence of master/slave that governs the relationship between the colonizer and his subjects. At that time, Lamming says, the migration of artists and intellectuals from Barbados to England was essentially motivated by the frantic search for the legitimization of colonial power. For the author of "Pleasure of Exile", this frenzied quest for symbolic sanctions is palpable proof of successful colonization.

In this twenty-first century, and although the historical context of analysis is quite different, the mass migration, intellectual or otherwise, from Sub-Saharan Africa to industrialized countries, revives the relevance of Lamming's work. In addition to the search for the anointing of the metropolis that we witnessed yesterday, new parameters are now added:the desire to escape the cruelty of local tyrannies, with their cohorts of brutality; the attractiveness of better working conditions; the dream of personal fulfillment; not to mention the insidious diktat of capital, baptized by the sweet euphemism of globalization

Presenter: André Djiffack

Prof. André Djiffack is originally from Cameroon where he received his Doctorat de 3e Cycle. He did his postdoctoral research in Germany and completed a Ph D in South Africa. He teaches Francophone African literature and culture at the University of Oregon since 2000. His research focuses mainly on Mongo Beti, with the publication of three-volume anthology titled Mongo Beti: Le Rebelle I, II, and III by Gallimard. He is currently finalizing a book manuscript titled Africa of Absurdities: Between Identities and Migrations.

Lecture 2: Yosa Vidal, Utopias in Recent South American Feminist Narratives

From colonization, when America served as the geographical space in which Europe imagined a geographical and human paradise, to the dream of order and control of a "creole and literate city" (Angel Rama) in the nineteenth century, to twentieth-century leftist revolutionary projects, utopias in Latin America have traditionally projected the desires of hegemonic subjects, whether intellectuals, priests, or political strongmen.In this presentation, I focus on two recent texts that share an idea of utopia as a function (Ernst Bloch) to imagine a post-patriarchal and radically decolonized world. Both authors propose an imagined space outside of the limits of the nation and of loyalties, a "non-place" inhabited by Indian women, whores, and lesbians. "It is time to understand that we do not need rights but utopias. The discourse of rights stupefies us, but utopias wake us up, make us uncomfortable, tickle us, and bring us closer to the impossible, the stubborn, the untamed" says the performer, poet, and political activist Marfa Galindo in her Bastard Feminism (Bolivia 2022). On the other hand, The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Cabez6n Camara (Argentina 2017), re-writes Martin Fierro from a feminist and postcolonial point of view as an adventure that culminates in a utopian space - a community that lives in symbiosis with nature and in defense of pleasure.Galindo's poetic/political proposals and Cabez6n Camara's literary fiction call for the dismantling of patriarchal violence at the heart of capitalist society through"anonymous bastards who inhabit cracks, who put down roots in hinges, who live without belonging and who prefer expulsion to submission" (Galindo). This subject does not seek to close meanings, give fixed answers or propose a destination, but to depatriarchalize society through a non-ideological ethical alliance.

Presenter: Yosa Vidal

Dr. Yosa Vidal is Instructor of Spanish, University of Oregon PhD, and an accomplished writer. She researches the relationship between aesthetics, literature, and politics in the Southern Cone. During the last few years she has produced various works of fiction, including Erase otra vez (Feroces Editores, Chile 2011), El Tarambana (Tajamar, Chile 2013, Mármara, Spain 2016), Los multipatópodos (Overol, Chile 2017). Her most recent novel, Vals Chilote, was published in Bolivia by Mantis and in Chile by the Fondo de Cultura Económica (2022).

Future Highlights

• Kenneth Calhoon: Savage Places: The Witch-Themed Film as “Crisis Heterotopia.” (Winter)
• Nathalie Hester: "Uchronia and Alternate Empires" (Winter or Spring)