The Unbearable Lightness of Bones: a Colloquium by Professor Brad Epps

Speakers): Professor Brad Epps

Join the DLCL for a colloquium with Professor Brad Epps (Harvard University & Cambridge University)! Lunch will be served!

This talk examines the interplay of affect and memory in visual and verbal works that grapple with the fate of the disappeared and the plight of those who remember them and search for their remains in the Atacama desert of Chile during and after the dictatorship.  Focusing on Patricio’s Guzmán’s lyrical documentary film, Nostalgia de la luz (2010), it also considers Paula Allen’s photographic essay Flores en el desierto and Raúl Zurita’s “land art,” all of which represent and “rework” the devastating effects of state-sponsored violence in the Atacama desert, as well as Guzmán’s film Chile, la memoria obstinada  (1997), which at once elicits and reflects on the variegated affective charge of the military coup and its remembrance and forgetting in post-dictatorial Chile.

Brad Epps is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Professor Epps is fluent in Spanish, French, and Catalan with reading knowledge of Portuguese, Galician, and Italian. He has written a variety of critically acclaimed books such as, Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity, with Luis Fernández-Cifuentes and All About Almodóvar: A Passion for Cinema, with Despina Kakoudaki. Professor Epps has also published many articles on the subjects of sexuality, ethics and Hispanic art and culture such as, “Proper Conduct: Reinaldo Arenas, Fidel Castro, and the Politics of Appearance” in The Journal of the History of Sexuality and “To be (a Part) of a Whole: Constitutional Patriotism and the Paradox of Democracy in the Wake of the Spanish Constitution of 1978” in the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos. Additionally, Professor Epps is currently working on two more books,  The Ethics of Promiscuity  and Barcelona and Cinema.