Post-Naturalist Fictions

Post-Naturalist Fictions
Date
Mon May 11th 2020, 5:00pm
Location
Zoom meeting

On Monday, May 11, 2020 at 5:00pm, doctoral candidates Daniel Hernández (ILAC, Stanford) and Sebastián Figueroa (Hispanic and Portuguese Studies, UPenn) will be discussing their research in progress and leading our discussion on the theme of Post-Naturalist Fictions: Representations of Capital and Forest in Colombia and Brazil.

Presenters have kindly shared the following descriptions of their talks:
Daniel Hernández (Stanford), “Mário de Andrade, Apprentice Ethnographer: Redrawing Fiction by Means of a Kodak”

I examine Mário de Andrade’s travelogue O turista aprendiz and its cognate photographic archive within a broader trove of visual and ethnographic materials from the Amazon. De Andrade’s 1927 Amazon expedition was key for transforming his subsequent fiction writing –particularly his novel Macunaíma (1928). I argue that the Kodak camera provided him with new ways to perceive the Amazonian world, beyond the more traditional naturalist model. These new perspectives oriented him to reflect about his own position as a modern metropolitan author and to redraw the limits between fact and fiction within both his narrative and ethnographic work.

Sebastián Figueroa (UPenn), “The Return of the Plantation”
I discuss the return of the plantation form in some contemporary Latin American novels as a result of the expansion of monocrop agribusiness, whose appropriation of land and agricultural production, as Vandana Shiva maintains, entails the appropriation of life by capital. Focusing particularly on Juan Cárdenas’ El diablo de las provincias (2017), I analyze the role of conspiracy narratives to understand how the plantation is a violent machine that brings about the material, the social, and the political to take over the world and preclude any future other than that of the capitalist regime.

As mentioned above, the meeting will take place next Monday, May 11, 2020 at 5:00pm (via Zoom).

To receive the link to the meeting, please RSVP here

For more information, please email rwain [at] stanford.edu (rwain[at]stanford[dot]edu).