Lecture by Román de la Campa (U Pennsylvania): Roberto Bolaño and the Question of Literature

Speaker(s): Román de la Campa (U Pennsylvania)

Introduction by Ramón Saldívar, Professor of English and Comparative Literature:

"It is my pleasure today to welcome and to introduce to you our esteemed guest, Professor Román de la Campa.

Professor De la Campa is Professor and Chair of the Department of Hispanic Languages & Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania.

After having received a BA at Briar Cliff College in Iowa and his PhD at the University of Minnesota, Professor de la Campa joined the faculty of Stony Brook University where he went through the ranks, occupying positions in the American Studies Program, as an affiliated member of the English Department, a member of the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature before moving to Penn in 2007.

He has also held visiting positions at the University of Simón Bolívar, Quito, Ecuador 1997, the University of Venezuela, Mérida, 1999, and the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2004

He served in numerous ADMINISTRATIVE capacities, including as Chair of the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures, Stony Brook, 1994-1997; the Chair of the Department of Comparative Studies and has headed the International Programs, Stony Brook.

PUBLICATIONS

His research specializations include the span of Latin American literatures, theory and cultural practices. His publications include over a hundred essays published in the United States, Latin America and Europe, including, most prominently:

• Políticas sin Telos, La Habana: Instituto Cubano del libro (2005)
• Cuba On My Mind: Journeys to a Severed Nation, London: Verso, 2000
• Latin Americanism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999

Additionally, he has also co-edited several volumes, including:

• Late Imperial Cultures, co-edited (Verso: 1995),
• America Latina y sus comunidades discursivas: cultura y literature en la era global(Caracas: 1999),
• América Latina: Tres Interpretaciones actuales sobre su estudio, con Ignacio Sosa y Enrique Camacho (Universidad Autónoma de México. Edición especial. 2004), and
• Nuevas cartografias latinoamericanas(Letras Cubanas, Havana 2007).

He currently has two books in progress

• Latin, Latino, American: Split States and Global Imaginaries(Verso); and
• Split-States and Global Imaginaries, both scheduled to appear with Verso.

In the past few years, I have been doing in-depth research on the topics of American modernism and modernity, especially as those topics intersect with matters of race and ethnicity in American cultural history and their relationship with matters of transculturation and transnationalism in the American borderlands. 

In the course of my research, I have read the works of probably all of the major writers touching on those topics.  Professor De la Campa’s research in this area, is an impressive and intellectually sophisticated addition to Latin American literary studies and especially to its relationship to U.S. Latino studies. 

Professor De la Campa’s various projects clarify the relationships between U.S. and Latin American representations of what is uniquely “American,” a daunting project by all measures.  I find his work theoretically rigorous, astute in its assessment of the current state of Latin American studies in the U.S., and always,  useful as introduction to the growing body of scholarship on Latinos in the U.S.

 His descriptions of the intellectual, cultural, and social history of the U.S. Latino American tradition, spanning not just its literary history but also its theorizations of the subject, puts him in useful dialogue with scholars engaged with the project of conceiving a hemispheric “American” cultural tradition. 

I look forward especially to the completion of the work in progress, particularly, “Latin, Latino, American: Split States and Global Imaginaries.” 

It promises to offer scholars of late twentieth-century and early-twenty-first century Latino American cultural production an excellent comparative analysis that brings together matters that cross-cut U.S. and Latin American concerns with hybridity, transculturation, and multicultural literary production.

 In this new project, Professor De la Campa succeeds in identifying the major strands of U.S. Latino cultural history of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and rightly understands the methodological issues that determine how the ongoing “latinization” of the United States must eventually be understood.    

His presentation today is entitled "Roberto Bolaño and the Question of Literature."

Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Professor Román de la Campa."

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This event cosponsored by the TransAmerican Studies workshop and the Stanford Center for Latin American Studies.