"What is Art Doing for You?" By Southern California Working Group on "Hispanism: Social and Critical Thought"


 Latin American Studies     Apr 25 2019 | 9:00 AM - 4:00 PM HG1030

Adriana Johnson (Comparative Literature), Horacio Legrás (Spanish &
Portuguese)

This symposium is loosely integrated into the initiative "Theory in Latin America/Latin America in Theory," organized by faculty of the departments of Spanish and Portuguese, History, Comparative Literature and Film and Media Studies of the University of Southern California (where the first meeting was held in 2016), the University of California at Riverside (where the second meeting took place in 2017) and the University of California-Irvine. The collective – which consists of a core group of faculty from these and other academic institutions in California interested in reflecting on the kinds of theoretical work currently at stake in the field of Latin American studies - is working on extending our collaboration beyond the form of academic conferences to encompass other academic and extra-curricular collaborations.

There is a general agreement that the Humanities are experiencing an important paradigmatic shift that affects,  fundamentally, the centrality of literary works and literary mediation as a model for humanistic inquire in general. In the last decades, professionals working in the areas of literature and other forms of archives mediated by practices of writing have been paying increasing attention to film, art and to the realm of images in general as a source of
renovation for their fields of study. And yet, the realm of art is as besieged as that of literature by the crisis of representation, the end of aesthetic autonomy, the commodification of its products and procedures, and the impossibility of escaping the straight jacket that connects art to either truth and praxis or aestheticism and escapism.
Hence the question posed by this conference: "What is art doing for you?"

We do not expect all or even most of the participants to this conference to answer this strategic question head on. Our goal is not to immobilize thinking and creativity for the sake of a philosophical reflection on why it is that we do the things we do. Instead, the conference is aimed at highlighting the new horizons that are opened by a more complex and nuance understanding of the work of culture as that understanding rests, increasingly, on a collaboration and mixing of different expressive registers that throughout modernity has been rigorously compartmentalized both in terms of their production and their study. The breaking down of academic boundaries is in our opinion the most salient morphological event taking place today in the culture of the humanities. The conference issues an invitation to
colleagues and graduate students to reflect on how this shift is taking place in their own work.

Invited guests: María de Rosario Acosta (Depaul), Natalia Brizuela
(UC-Berkeley)

The conference coordinates with a workshop organized by graduate students from Comparative Literature and Spanish & Portuguese which will take place the day before, Wednesday April 24.

This browser does not support PDFs. Please download the PDF to view it: Download .