On February 9^th, Professor Ally Ladha took the floor at the Humanities Institute to deliver a talk titled “Hegel and the

Professor Ladha and Professor Michael Lynch, director of the Humanities Institute, discussing Tuogo’s installation.

Postcolonial State: Aesthetics, Subjectivity, and the Idea of Freedom.” Professor Ladha –UConn Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies – offered what he called a radical reinterpretation of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s writings related to history and African subjectivity.

The talk began with a Hegelian meditation on an installation by artist Barthélemy Tuogo, realized at the 2014 Biennale of Contemporary African Art in Dakar. The piece, titled “The Last Supper,” consists of a bau bau-shaded courtyard containing fifty-four stools – representing either the group of fifty-four African nations comprising the African Union, or the distinct group of fifty-four African member states of the United Nations – surrounding a garden of red beans in the shape of the African continent. The arrangement of the stools around the garden, which itself is neatly outlined by a groove carved into the dirt, evokes a scene of consumption-in-potentia – the continent a feast for the powers that frame it. This installation, Ladha explained, by analogy, raises questions on the content and shape of the African subject in a postcolonial climate.

Professor Ladha and Professor Michael Lynch, director of the Humanities Institute, discussing Tuogo’s installation.

Professor Ladha then drew on documentation of Hegel’s lesser known spoken lectures to provide a nuanced rearticulation of some of the philosopher’s most frequently misconstrued arguments on the master-slave dialectic, outlined in his foundational text The Phenomenology of Spirit. Far from justifying the subjugation of so-called ahistorical peoples, Ladha suggested, Hegel’s philosophical system offers a powerful framework in which we may better interrogate the dialectics of freedom in a postcolonial age.

 

On March 11^th, 2016, award-winning author and historian Santiago de Pablo (University of the Basque Country) held a screening of his recent documentary film project titled Basque Swastika (in Spanish, Una esvástika sobre el Bidasoa). The 2013 film, directed by Javier Barajas and Alfonso Andrés Ayarza, is a fascinating exercise in metacinema, exploring the context and significance of a long-lost Nazi documentary on the topic of the Basque nation.

The original 22-minute Nazi film, released in 1944 under the title Im Lande der Basken (In the Land of the Basques), assumes a pseudo-anthropological perspective with regard to the Basque country, emphasizing the racial purity and communitarian character of its people as well as the isolated and idyllic landscape of the region. De Pablo was careful to point out that these optics exaggerate certain aspects of life in the region while ignoring others, such as area’s urban and industrial centers, in order to evoke a sense of mystical kinship with the Basques among a German audience.

Basque Swastika includes scenes from the Nazi documentary and other historical footage, along with interviews of people with significant links to Im Lande der Basken – among them Teresa Sandoval, the researcher who first rediscovered the obscure film in a Berlin archive, and Nicolas Brieger, son of the 1944 film’s director Herbert Brieger. This blend of sources yield a nuanced exposition of the Nazi film itself, as well as its creation and rediscovery, but the ultimate effect serves to preserve the air of mystery surrounding this very peculiar cinematic artifact.

Here is a brief recap of some of the happenings so far this Fall semester

In September, the Medieval Studies section hosted the third iteration of Medieval Live! A Multimedia Middle Ages, organized by Professor Andrea Celli. In addition to performances by students and faculty of texts in original languages of the medieval period, Visiting Scholar Professor Dyan Elliot of Northwestern University delivered a talk titled “The Corrupter of Boys: the Medieval Church and Child Abuse”. In November, Professor Celli – along with the Italian and Medieval Studies sections – hosted “Leaves that scatter through the universe,” a seminar on Dante’s works in context. Presentations by invited speakers included Giovanni Spani of College of the Holy Cross’ piece “Who Were Dante’s Merchants?”; Francesco Marco Aresu of Wesleyan University’s “Dante’s Books: Materiality and Textuality of the Comedy”; and Michael Papio of Umass Amherst’s “Creative Interpretation in Bocaccio’s Commentary on Dante’s Inferno”.

November also saw a visit to campus by Michigan University Professor Bill, who came to speak about his work in the field of language acquisition. VanPatten – who’s extensive résumé currently lists him as Professor of Spanish and Second Language Studies, affiliate faculty member in Cognitive Science, Director of Romance Language Instruction, and co-editor of the international journal Studies in Second Language Acquisition at Cambridge University Press – argues that the traditional rules-based model of language instruction fails to form underlying linguistic representation in the learner’s mind. Linguistic “rules” as we generally understand them, according to VanPatten, exist exclusively on the level of explicit knowledge and are never internalized to generate implicit understanding of linguistic structures. The consequences of this line of thought for language instruction and research in language acquisition, as VanPatten suggests, may prove to be transformative.

The Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life celebrated its 36th anniversary this November with a panel discussion by Center alumni and long-term contributors and UConn Professors Arnold Dashefsky and Stuart Miller. The event also featured a keynote address by David Ruderman, Professor of Modern Jewish History and Director of the Herbert D. Katz Center Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, presenting an overview of the evolution Judaic Studies over the past 36 years.

LCL’s Spanish section, in association with the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, Puerto Rican/Latin American Cultural Center, and LANGSA, sponsored a presentation by Professor Danae Diéguez of the Facultad de Arte de los Medios de Comunicación Audiovisual de la Universidad de las Artes (Cuba). Professor Diéguez, who is a specialist in gender and sexuality as well as Cuban and women’s film, gave a Spanish-language talk titled “Tensiones y (dis)tensiones entre el cine cubano y la institucionalidad. Diálogos posibles” [“Tensiones and (dis)tensions between Cuban Film and Institutionalism. Possible dialogues”] which was interpreted live for the English-speaking audience.

The 2015 Deutsch-Kolloquium (sponsored by LANGSA) is presenting two talks this Fall semester. On November 19th, PhD candidate Silke Gräfnitz will present her piece “Female, foreign, flee(t)ing – Female voices from war and conflict zones”. Then on December 2nd, Professor Katharina von Hammerstein will deliver “Germany’s ‘Other Genocide’: Essential Witnesses to Mass Killings of the Herero in German Southwest Africa, 1904-08”.

On December 3rd, the Medieval Studies Program will host Professor Laura K. Morreale, Associate Director of Medieval Studies at Fordham University, for a presentation titled “Telling the Story of French. After the Linguistic, Spatial, and Digital Turns”. The talk will focus on the emergence and circulation of early French-language texts in the Eastern Mediterranean and elsewhere.

 

After several years of hiatus, Linguae – the newsletter of the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages – is back in production. The birth of Linguae 2.0 responds to the changing material realities of publishing today, embracing the digital format in order to facilitate distribution while eliminating the costs and waste associated with paper printing. The goal of this newsletter is to foster a sense of community among those – Alumni, professors, staff, and students – who continue to shape and define LCL as a departmental unit. By highlighting the projects and achievements of our constituent parts we hope to intensify communications within the whole and, of course, to stimulate the growth of new connections. To these ends we have also ventured into the digital landscape of social media, creating a departmental Facebook page and Twitter outlet, in an effort to extend the reach of LCL-related news and announcements to include a broader audience. The social dimension of these platforms opens new possibilities for intra/extradepartmental engagement whose full potential remains to be seen.