How do we remain with what remains? In this talk, Dr. Pedro Rolón asks how erosive processes in literature and visual art—figured through gradual loss and material transformation—open alternative approaches to historical memory in Puerto Rico, the last remaining colony of the United States. Drawing attention to literary and visual works from Puerto Rico and its U.S. diaspora that formally mediate encounters with decay, he argues that these works function as weathered witnesses: contingent and shifting sites from which to reexamine the sediments of empire and to attend to how remembering persists under conditions of ongoing colonial attrition.
Pedro J. Rolón Machado is a President's and Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Comparative Literature department at UC Irvine. He earned his PhD in Comparative Literature with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory from the University of California, Berkeley, where he also earned an MA in English. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Mellon foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry, the Philip Brett LGBT Studies Fellowship, and the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. His research and writing projects focus on Hemispheric American and Caribbean studies, Puerto Rican studies, poetry and poetics, US Latinx postwar queer underground cultures, and the environmental humanities.
The image credit: Ada del Pilar Ortiz (b. 1995, Barranquitas, Puerto Rico), Obrero I (Worker I) from Aguirre (2017-2018). Flaked exterior house paint on aliphatic resin mounted on fabric, 72 x 96 in. Courtesy of the artist.