Upcoming

*UPDATED LOCATION: TAPER HALL (THH) 309K*

This seminar will examine how human-built infrastructure is reshaping the life trajectories of nonhuman animals, and vice versa. Speakers will focus in particular on the ways that migratory animals are navigating a transformed environment, and on how human actors—whether scientists, activists or artists—track their movements and seek to help them adapt.

Panelists:

Peter Alagona (UCSB) – “Defining Recovery in a World Transformed: The Tortured Case of Grizzly Bears in the Lower 48 U.S. States”
Ashley Carse (Vanderbilt) – “The Panama Canal Expansion: A Fish Story”
Heather Swanson (Aarhus) – “Infrastructure in More-than-human Bodies and Landscapes: From Comparisons to Cascades”

This live Radio Cachimbona show will discuss the political persecution that the Bukele administration is engaging in, and how the administration’s proposed return to mining will severely impact the country’s environment, access to water, and health. Join us to learn, spread awareness, and, if you are able to, help raise funds for the community of Santa Marta.

RECENT NEWS:

Jan. 29, 2025: “Hundreds of Human Rights, Environmental and Faith Groups Together with Academics and Lawyers from 44 Countries Call on President Nayib Bukele to Drop Charges against Five Salvadoran Water Defenders and Reject Mining Projects in El Salvador”
Jan. 31, 2025: “Resistance to mining grows as environmentalists’ trial approaches”
Feb. 6, 2025: “Water Defenders Refuse To Attend Hearing, Denounce Lack of Judicial Independence That Threatens Their Lives”
Feb. 17, 2025: “Social movements stand with Santa Marta 5”

A discussion of Natalie Lauren Belisle’s new book, Caribbean Inhospitality: The Poetics of Strangers at Home (Rutgers University Press, 2025). Registration is required.

About the Book: The Caribbean has a global reputation for extending unparalleled hospitality to foreign guests. Yet local citizens express feeling alienated from the Caribbean nations they call home. Here, Natalie Lauren Belisle probes the relationship between these incompatible narratives of Caribbean life. Departing from tourist-centered critiques of the Caribbean’s visitor economy, Belisle instead gives primacy to the political life of the Caribbean citizen-subject within a broader hospitality regime. Reading literary, cinematic, and digital texts that traverse the Spanish, Anglophone, and Francophone Caribbean, Belisle interprets citizens’ estrangement through misdirected political deliberation and demonstrates that inhospitality is institutionalized through the aesthetic, reproducing itself in the laws that condition belonging and membership in the nation-state. Ultimately, Caribbean Inhospitality recasts the decay of nation/state sovereignty in the postcolonial Caribbean within the contours of neoliberalism, international relations, and cosmopolitanism.

Since the unofficial end of the economic crisis formally known as “The Special Period in Times of Peace,” Cuba has undergone marked social, economic, and structural transformations that have impacted the conditions of literary and artistic production on the island. On the one hand, while the Special Period witnessed what literary scholar Esther Whitfield has described as the new “Boom” of Cuban literature (especially the novel), there has been a discernible shift away from prose fiction (and the book form) and toward other counter-expressive forms such visual and audiovisual art, performance, and digital media. On the other hand, the rules of what counts as literature and “art” in Cuba have tightened under new laws. Moreover, in the last three years, the island has experienced mass migration of Cuban citizens—nearing 500,000, a number that exceeds the Mariel exodus of 1980. If Cuba’s social history is a strong indicator of its aesthetic currents, such a significant demographic shift will radically reshape the ecology of Cuban literary and artistic production.

This two-day interdisciplinary symposium invites scholars in Cuban Studies to discuss and reflect on transformations and innovations in contemporary Cuban literature, culture, art, and media, from the period following the Cuban Revolution until the present. “Cuban Aesthetics in the After,” gestures to Cuba y el día después, a field-defining anthology of essays edited by Cuban writer Iván de la Nuez, who calls on Gen X and millennial Cuban writers and intellectuals to reimagine Cuban society in aftermath of a revolution that failed to birth the future promised to them. “Cuban Aesthetics in the ‘After’” is a provocation to think of the “after” as an aesthetic articulated and shaped by Cuban literature, visual culture, performance, and media within and beyond the space-time of the Cuban Revolution.