Jon Beasley-Murray: "Utopia in Ruins: The Ochagavía Hospital"
Department: Comparative Literature
Date and Time: December 2, 2014 | 4:00 PM-5:30 PMEvent Location: Humanities Gateway 1010
Event Details
Jon Beasley-Murray is an associate professor in the Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies at the University of British Columbia. He combines an interest in Latin American cultural, literary and political history with Italian social theory (particularly Antonio Negri), cultural studies, Marxist theory and continental philosophy, especially Deleuze and Guattari. His book Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America was published in 2010 by University of Minnesota Press.
This talk is part of a new project entitled American Ruins on the significance of six ruined sites from Alberta, Canada to Santiago de Chile. While ruins are often understood as a structure that is lacking (decayed, deteriorated, destroyed) and that needs something else to make sense of it (discourse, narrative, story-telling), this talk will argue that ruins are something else. Ruins, like Santiago's Ochagavía hospital, should be understood in terms of surplus and positivity rather than lack or disintegration. It is their insistent presence, not absence, that checks our otherwise confident progress and which can trip us up and force us to reassess what we understand what ourselves and our environs.
Co-sponsored by the departments of Comparative Literature and Spanish & Portuguese, the Latin American Research Cluster, and the Humanities Commons.