Oct
27

Please join us in our Work-in-Progress presentation by Ph.D. candidate, Gwen Pare in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at University of California, Irvine. 
 

This event will be hosted through zoom:
Thursday, October 27, 2022,
12:00-1:00pm.

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Gwendolen Pare presents from her second chapter, for which she recently travelled to archives in Kingston, Jamaica, and St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, thanks to the center's summer research grant. The presentation focuses on the wound of slavery in Derek Walcott's Nobel prize winning poem, Omeros (1992). This wound is central to Omeros as a mythological reference, as a figure for suffering, and as something the plot keeps stumbling over, since the wound resists healing. This stubborn wound challenges us to think through a non-curative, even wounding and transmissive, care for language. The presentation concludes with some insights into the historical records of the archives in Kingston and St Augustine. These records shifted into view the importance of techniques and craft in public debate and artists' concerns at the time of writing of Omeros.