On October 17th, the University Libraries will host a lecture by Dr. Javier Uriarte in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month:
Javier Uriarte holds a PhD from New York University and is Assistant Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures. His research focuses on the intersections between travel writing and war during the process of modernization in South America. He works on the spatial imagination in Latin America, and in the ways in which war, capital and the state have reconfigured the continents’s geographies in modern times. His book Travel Writing, War and the State in Latin America: The Desertmakers, is forthcoming with Routledge. He has published the co-edited volume Entre el humo y la niebla: guerra y cultura en América Latina (2016), and a second co-edited book is forthcoming with Liverpool University Press, titled Intimate Frontiers: a Literary Geography of the Amazon.
This talk will discuss the ways in which Alfred d’Escragnolle Taunay, one of Brazil’s best known Romantic writers, approached the Paraguayan War (1864-5), one of the most tragic events in the history of Latin America, in which the author participated. Specifically, the talk will focus on the conservative ideology of the author, and on the ways in which he constructed the fall of the imperial system in Brazil (1889) in his book of Memoirs (1890-99). In this retrospective perspective, the I goes back to his relationship to Brazil’s aristocracy and his participation in the war. However, the fact that the book was only published (at his request) only after his death, explains the critical tone he adopts here with respect to the role of the state during the war. This is in many ways the perspective of an author whose world (the imperial system) has crumbled under his eyes. This book is a testimony of this process, and the Paraguayan War has a central role in it.
This event will take place at 4:00 in the Special Collections Seminar Room on the second floor of Melville Library. Please register here.
This talk is the first in a two-part series. Please join us on October 30th for a presentation by Dr. Elena Davidiak, “The Bilingual Identity and its Expression in Oral and Written Form.”
Kate Kasten-Mutkus
email: kathleen.kasten@stonybrook.edu
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