[PAST EVENT] Spanish American Modernism and the Arts of Queer Aging

March 11, 2019
5pm - 6pm
Location
Boswell Hall (formerly Morton Hall), 140C
100 Ukrop Way
Williamsburg, VA 23185Map this location
Access & Features
  • Open to the public
María Blanco, University of Oxford

The period between 1880 and 1920 saw the development in Spanish America of modernismo ? a movement marked by the rapprochement by young writers and artists to aesthetic developments in France, Belgium, Germany, and a symbolic distantiation from Spain. The newly developing print medium of magazines connected writers across diverse points of the Latin American region. Among the foremost publications of modernista art were La Revista Moderna and La Revista Moderna de México, published between 1898 and 1911. In this presentation Prof. Blanco situates the modernistas within a fin-de-siècle culture steeped in the discourses of decadence and degeneration on the one hand and rejuvenation and youth on the other. Reading the Revistas’ artwork, she explores how the magazines represent the uniqueness of that moment in Spanish American aesthetic culture through a complex negotiation of newness and old age.

María del Pilar Blanco (W&M LCST '99)  is University Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Spanish American Literature, Fellow and Tutor in Spanish, Trinity College,  and Associate Lecturer in Spanish, Worcester College at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Ghost-Watching American Modernity (2012) and co-editer with Esther Peeren of Popular Ghosts (2010) and The Spectralities Reader (2013), all of which explore various narratives of haunting as responses to different processes of modernization in the American hemisphere and beyond. Her current book project, Modernist Laboratories, explores the intersections between literary and scientific innovation in Spanish America between 1870 and 1910, particularly Mexico, Cuba and Argentina.

Contact

Arthur Knight