On March 23^rd, LCL was pleased to host a panel on Intercultural Literature Citizenship and Public Discourse, including presentations by Professor Stefan Hermes of the University of Freiburg, Germany; Professor Eleni Coundouriotis of UConn’s English Department; and Professors Manuela Wagner and Anke Finger of LCL’s German section.

After some introductory comments by Professor Finger, Professor Hermes spoke about the recognition of blackness and race in German public discourse, presenting three examples from (popular) German media, including a black facing incident, a debate on the n-word and censorship in children books, and the media coverage of the mass sexual assaults which may have led to a shift in public opinion regarding both incoming refugees and certain “problematic cultural differences.” He stated that the majority of the German population considers Germany to be a “white” country, being that “white” is the norm, and that as white people tend to argue that, since they are not racists, their actions cannot be categorized as racist.

Professor Coundouriotis then spoke from a literature and human rights perspective, focusing on the term “realism,” and the different qualities of testimony and witnessing and the implications of visual media. The message appeared to be that people demand authenticity and realist descriptions, for this is what they understand to be the truth. There is no truth, Coundouriotis declared, but however the “truth” is what results most persuasive. She explained that literature fictionalizes and individualizes, thus giving mediated access to events. While testimony does constitute first-hand reportage, it often may be influenced by trauma. Condouriotis said that giving witness is important as a secondary form of talking about what happened, and all the more so because it implies an interruption of the atrocities.

Professor Wagner later talked about the concept of intercultural citizenship as the key goal in coping with globalization. She pointed to the recent terror attacks in Brussels as yet another sad example of how important critical cultural awareness and intercultural competences are in an evermore pluralistic world. Wagner further commented on the topic of intercultural citizenship from the teaching perspective, presenting projects from the foreign language classroom, as well as international, and interdisciplinary projects.

Finally, Professor Finger shared a video clip in which people of Indian extraction spoke about the representation of Indian people in popular culture in the United States. Drawing attention to the vast quantity of comments that the video had garnered on YouTube, Finger emphasized the importance of including digital media in public discourse on pressing topics. She argued that people in today’s world are no longer mere consumers of media, but are rather active contributors and participants of public debates taking place via social media.

The discussion that followed the panelist’s four presentations included some pointed concerns on strategies for disrupting mainstream discourse surrounding topics of interculturality and global citizenship, and possibilities for including marginalized voices and opinions in public debates. Questions were also raised on the topic of radical and offensive opinions, such as if and how these are to be dealt with, and what would be the repercussions of policing public discourse by silencing “unpleasant” voices or seeking to teach “correct” attitudes for the sake of public engagement.

Special thanks to Maria Reger for making this piece possible.

UConn was proud to welcome narrator and podcast producer Daniel Alarcón to deliver this year’s Luis B. Eyzaguirre lecture on March 22^nd in the Student Union. Alarcón’s has risen to notoriety in recent years for his literary successes – including the novels Lost City Radio (Harper 2007) and At Night We Walk in Circles (Riverhead Books 2013) and short story collections War by Candlelight (HarperCollins 2005) and El rey siempre está por encima del pueblo (Sexto Piso 2009) – as well as his role in founding the popular Spanish-language podcast Radio Ambulante (2012). The talk dealt with the narrator’s philosophy on storytelling, according to which he views the act of journalistic and fictional narration as essentially the same. Alarcón spoke about the interrelation of his journalistic and narrative experience specifically in the case of his writings relating to prisons and prisoners, including pieces researched during visits to Riker’s Island in New York City and the infamous Lurigancho prison in Perú. The author read aloud from his novel At Night We Walk in Circles as well as his Harper’s Magazine article titled “All Politics is Local” (2012) to draw attention to the ways in which these two narrative projects bleed together. He then played for the audience an audio story that he had recently completed called “El Indio”, told in the voice of a long-time Mexican prison gang member-turned-PhD specialist in gang issues. Alarcón highlighted the impact of added audio production elements, including music and side effects, which serve to emphasize the comical tone of the speaker’s tale. He pointed out that what he liked best about this particular piece was that it “takes the aesthetics of well-done literature and combines them with journalism, and puts it in sound.” He summarized his talk as a retracing the steps of his journey as an artist, journalist, and storyteller, explaining that he considers himself above all as narrator, that is, a person who tells stories across all genres.

Professor of Spanish and Portuguese of University of California Berkeley Julio Ramos visited UConn on February 25^th to deliver a talk titled “Literatura, droga, y estado: Los encadenados de Josefina Guevara,” dealing with the relationship between drug addiction and individual freedoms in Puerto Rico as glimpsed in the 1966 novel by author Josefina Guevara. Professor Ramos, who is both an influential writer of cultural criticism and an award-winning director of documentary films, provided a social-historical context for considering Guevara’s novel, describing the ways in which drug addiction in Puerto Rico in the 1960s and thereafter has been treated by State authorities as a criminal status, rather than as a mental health or medical issue. He explained that such a scenario robs addicted persons of their right to self-determination with regard to their options for treatment, and that it exemplifies the problematic relation of biopolitical control between the State and its subjects. Ramos further spoke about various approaches to drug commentary in literature, remarking on observed differences between the sensationalizing tendencies of narcoliterature and other literatures in which narcotics may paradoxically be viewed as both a subject’s route of escape as well as her ticket to State custody. All of this was discussed in terms of the broader economic and political situation of Puerto Rico as both a center of pharmaceutical production and as an Associated Free State of the United States – conditions which have had formative influence on the relations between State sovereignty and the Puerto Rican populace.

Dr. Sonjoy Dutta-Roy Presents on Folk Theater in India

On March 23^rd Professor of English at the University of Allahabad – and father of PhD candidate Arnab Roy of LCL’s Comparitive Literature section – Dr. Sonjoy Dutta-Roy gave a presentation at Babbidge Library’s Class of 1947 Conference Room on the spirit of disruption in folk theater forms of India. The goal of Dr. Dutta-Roy’s talk was decidedly non-encyclopedic. The speaker chose to embrace a performative mode of expression, weaving a narrative of recent Indian folk theater using specific examples from the country’s ritual tradition and their links to experimental theatric forms of past decades. Dutta-Roy structured his discussion on metaphorical grounds borrowed from the Nāṭya Śāstra, the ancient Indian treatise on performative arts, in which he identified two crucial disruptions in the development of theatrical production in India. Theater being the primary vehicle for the percolation of vedic knowledge from higher to lower classes, these disruptions are endowed with great significance. The first disruption occurred, Dr. Dutta-Roy explained, when upper-caste participants of traditional fertility festivities decided to banish lower-caste and tribal people – refferred to as “demons” – from the performative spaces where ritual theater was performed. These “demons” were blamed for subtle disturbances in the performances, such as causing actors to forget their lines, and were thus denied access to newly ordained protective spaces where the previously open-air productions would take place. The second disruption detailed by Dutta-Roy had the opposite effect, when the high castes determined that the theatrical arts contaminated the purity of their people and ejected performers from their midst. Theater was then cast back out into the public sphere of the lower classes, setting the stage for later social and political controversies still in play today. According to Dr. Dutta-Roy, contemporary experimental theater in India continues to enact the legacy of these two disruptions in new and thought provoking ways.

TQC, The University of Connecticut’s first fully open-access graduate journal, is born right here in LCL

The 2014-2015 academic year saw the foundation of The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal, the University of Connecticut’s first fully-digital, open-access graduate journal. With the help of LCL, LANGSA, El Instituto (Institute of Latino/a, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies), and Digital Commons@UConn, The Quiet Corner published its first issue this past May. Founders Carlos Gardeazábal Bravo, William Stark, and Charles LeBel – all Ph.D. candidates in LCL’s Spanish Studies section – launched the project as a means to gain insight into the online publishing industry and to create a space for graduate students to showcase their research. According to its mission statement:

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal is an open-access, bi-annual research forum edited by graduate students of humanities, arts, and social sciences at the University of Connecticut (LCL, ELIN). The journal facilitates interdisciplinary collaboration towards cultural and social awareness, providing a locus for scholarly engagement across disciplines to promote critical thinking, research and creativity. The journal’s flexible focus centers on texts in a variety of languages, including but not limited to points of (dis)connection among worldwide literary, cultural and performance studies; digital, analogue and environmental humanities; translation and foreign language instruction.

The inaugural issue, titled “Translation Across the Arts, Culture, and Theory”, includes articles based on work presented at LANGSA’s 2014 “Found in Translation” conference by authors from the UConn graduate community and beyond. Issue 2 of The Quiet Corner, which will also be a collaboration with LANGSA, is expected to land in early Spring, 2016. Visit www.thequietcornerjournal.com to view the current issue or contact quiet.corner.journal@gmail.com for more information on TQC.

 

During my first few weeks in Granada, I came across a piece of art that said “Los ojos que no han visto Granada no han visto nada”. I knew at that very moment that I had chosen to study abroad in one of the most unique and historical cities in the world. Upon arriving in Granada, the anxiety that I had felt entirely disappeared as I was greeted by my señora. Her and twenty-two others opened their doors to my classmates and me, fed us more than we asked for, and taught us more about the culture and language than we ever could have learned in a traditional classroom setting. I got the opportunity to explore villages outside of Granada with my host family, eat delicious home cooked meals everyday, and learn my señora’s secret recipes.

Taking five classes in Granada was an entirely new experience because I learned about the culture, art history, and political aspects of Spain, which I was then able to experience first-hand. In my political science class, I learned about Spain’s financial crisis and their high unemployment rates. While living in this beautiful country for four months, I witnessed homelessness and poverty daily. In my art history class, I learned about every artistic detail and symbolic meaning that Antonio Gaudí invested in La Sagrada Familia. Visiting Barcelona on an excursion trip was one of my most memorable days in Spain because I was able to stare in awe at Gaudí’s incredible artwork that I had learned about all semester. It is the most incredible feeling to have had invested myself in this language since my preschool years and then experience the beauty of this incredible country first-hand. Living in Granada and visiting thirteen other cities throughout Spain opened my eyes to a valuable experience that I would have never had without the opportunity to study abroad.

Kara Casale (pictured here in the Sacromonte neighborhood of Granada) is a junior from West Long Branch, NJ, double-majoring in Spanish and Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences. Following graduation in May 2017, Kara plans to attend graduate school in order to pursue a career as a Bilingual Speech Language Pathologist.

After Graduating in May, a Chinese Major Looks Back

As a testament to the rising popularity of Chinese Studies at UConn, LCL was proud to see its first batch of Chinese majors graduate in May of 2015. One of these pioneering graduates was Marc Schuman, a Chinese and Accounting dual-degree recipient who is now proving his mettle in the international finance industry. We asked Marc to share a few words on his experience in the Chinese Section of LCL, and this is what he had to say:
During my four years at UConn, a lot changed. When I originally arrived on campus in 2011, there was a small Chinese department that offered only a couple of courses a semester. Four years later, three of us graduated as Chinese majors, in a department that was growing very rapidly. Going through the Chinese program at UConn allowed me to build a strong set of skills, including speaking Mandarin and understanding the Chinese culture. I was really lucky to study under Meng Laoshi, Yang Laoshi, Cheng Laoshi (Johnny), Cheng Laoshi (Anna), and others. Not only did we spend time in the classroom, but we celebrated Chinese holidays and engaged in other cultural activities. In addition, I had the opportunity to spend a half a year in China, where I studied and traveled. The combination of studying Chinese and accounting (in the business school) also gave me the opportunity to intern for an international financial services firm in Hong Kong. Currently, I am working in New York City at a large financial services firm with exposure to companies that conduct transactions all over the world. The experiences I have had with Chinese have certainly helped in terms of my professional career. However, the greatest benefit to learning Chinese has been the friends I have made from all over China. Even while living in New York, I am constantly meeting up with Chinese friends and co-workers for dim sum, hotpot, and more. Learning a language is a long journey, but the rewards are so gratifying. It will lead you on the road of wonderful surprises and life-changing events. I would highly recommend pursuing any language at UConn—the rewards are endless!

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.