Translucency: Memory, Materiality and Loss in the Venezuelan Diaspora
When and Where
Speakers
Description
We are glad to welcome Irina Troconis as our first guest for ¡Pa' Fuera! in a new series on the cultural productions of the Venezuelan diaspora in the 21st. century.
About the Presentation
In this talk, I propose an approach to the cultural production that has recently developed around and from the Venezuelan diaspora that focuses on what I, in my current book project, call “translucency”: a concept that refers to both an aesthetic and a practice of ethics, remembrance, and care. Through an analysis of a selection of installations and poetry volumes by contemporary Venezuelan artists and writers, I will argue that the way translucency is mobilized in their work renders material and urgent a mode of resistance to narratives that privilege transparency, linearity, immediacy, and legibility. As a result, a possibility emerges to see the contemporary migrant condition as a point of departure to explore new and radical ways of being with and for each other that go beyond discourses of empathy, compassion, and indifference.
About the Presenter
Irina Troconis is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies in Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University. Her research dialogues with Memory Studies, Venezuelan Studies, Politics and Performance, Affect Theory, Visual Culture, Material Culture, and Digital Humanities. She is the co-organizer of the online conversation series (Re)thinking Venezuela / (Re)pensando a Venezuela.
Dr. Troconis’s work has eloquently traced the influences that the Venezuelan diaspora has in the processes of nation and citizenship building in their multi-sited locations. The Necromantic State: Spectral Remains in the Afterglow of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution (under contract) – her first book –, as well as her second untitled book focusing on the Venezuelan diaspora, analyze cultural productions in multiple media forms. By focusing on the affective and materiality tied to the many cultural expressions in the diaspora, her work convincingly highlights the complex geopolitical and transnational processes that these diasporic subjects find themselves in and the ways that they are negotiating (through and by) their self-representations.
Related Events:
Migración, autonomía y mercado en la novela venezolana de hoy, by Miguel Gomes (University of Connecticut) on Wednesday, March 13, 2024.
Reading, by Daniel Centeno on Wednesday, March 20, 2024.