Central American Studies

Imaginaries of the Future 2021

Transborder Temporalities and Imaginaries of the Future

2021 Symposium

Haga clic aquí para ver el programa en español. 
This symposium will offer simultaneous English/Spanish interpretation.

Monday, April 5 

11:00am PT・2:00pm ET

Inaugural address: "The Transitivity of Trans*"
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information to join the meeting.
Claire Colebrook

Claire Colebrook is an Australian cultural theorist, currently appointed Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. She has published numerous works on Gilles Deleuze, visual art, poetry, queer theory, film studies, contemporary literature, theory, cultural studies, and visual culture.

About this lecture: In Females Andrea Long Cho makes a pointed objection to the ways in which ’trans*’ has been hijacked by various metaphysical schemas, so that trans* comes to signal a general transitivity. In a different vein, Tuck and Yang argue that decolonization is not a metaphor. In a different vein again, Frank Wilderson has insisted that nothing is analogous to anti-blackness. These significant theoretical interventions seek to stabilize and give ethical rigor to political forces. How then can one deal with the singularity of suffering while also speculating on the imaginative potential of actual life?  How do we negotiate the genuine ethical demand that no symbolic order can be faithful to the shock of the real, while also recognizing that without some form of lexical, virtual and actual migration there can be no future?

1:15pm PT・4:15pm ET

Film/Video Screening
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information to join the meeting.
Moderator:  Beatriz Cortez, California State University, Northridge

Laberintos, 2021. 14:21 min.
In Spanish with English subtitles.
Dir:  Guillermo Escalón

Doctor Alfredo Mackenney has two passions: cinema and the Pacaya volcano. With his camera he examines the soul of Guatemala, its inherited ills: a conquest that does not cease, a war of millenary specters, his loss of memory... Labrynths takes as a point of departure the images registered by the doctor and filmmaker Alfredo Mackenney in order to recreate --from a prose, poetic, and even fictional register-- a split Guatemala. Its recomposition becomes even more complex when carried out by a mind that, at the age of ninety, has begun to forget each day more.

2:00pm PT・5:00pm ET

The End of the Anthropocene
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information to join the meeting.
Moderator: Douglas Carranza, California State University, Northridge 

Hector M. Leyva (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras)
"Al pie de los volcanes: epifanía tectónica y extinción en las letras centroamericanas" 

Beatriz Cortez (California State University, Northridge)
"La vida de una estrella: Fábula asiática de Rodrigo Rey Rosa y otros finales del antropoceno"

Nancy Perez (Humboldt State University)
"Red Dust: Migration and Labor as Seismic Fractures to the Anthropocene"

4:00pm PT・7:00pm ET

Isonauta: Maria del Carmen Perez and Ángel Emilio Delgado Pérez
Click on the link above to join the meeting.
Moderator: Dr. Julia Medina, University of San Diego

Nicaraguan artists living in Chile, María del Carmen Pérez Cuadra (1971) is the author of Una ciudad de estatuas y perros (Santiago de Chile: Das Kapital, 2014); Sin luz artificial (Managua: CIRA, 2004. Premio Único del II Concurso Centroamericano de Literatura Escrita Por Mujeres “Rafaela Contreras”); and Rama. Microficciones (Managua: Isonauta Ediciones, 2016). She is a doctoral candidate of literature at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.  Ángel Emilio Delgado Pérez (1999) is a freelance illustrator and character designer who lives in Chile. He is studying Digital Animation at the Universidad de Santo Tomás.

5:30 pm PT・8:30 pm ET

Film/Video Screening
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information to join the meeting.
Moderator:  Valeria Grinberg Pla, Bowling Green State University

Antojología de Carl Rigby, 2019. 62 min.
In Spanish with English subtitles.
Dir: Eduardo Spiegler and María José Álvarez.

The result of two years of conversations, poems, monologues, performances documented at the studio, at his home, in Managua and in Pearl Lagoon.  An attempt to rescue the discourse of this inventor of words, sounds, and concepts.  Carl Rigby Moses (1945-2017) was one of the pioneers of oral Caribbean poetry in Nicaragua.  His poetic work incorporates performance registers that oscillate between social protest and a dialogue with the Afro-descendant tradition.

Tuesday, April 6

8:00am PT・11:00am ET

Book Presentations
En español desede el Facebook Live de la Biblioteca Padre Florentino Idoate, s.j., de la UCA
Click here to register for this event in English.
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information to join the meeting.

Ricardo Roque Baldovinos, La rebelión de los sentidos. Arte y revolución durante la modernización autoritaria en El Salvador. San Salvador: UCA Editores, 2020.

            Silvia López, Carleton College

            Ricardo Roque Baldovinos, Universidad Centroamericana "José Simeón Cañas"

Yansi Pérez, Más allá del duelo: Otras formas de imaginar, sentir y pensar la memoria centroamericana. San Salvador: UCA Editores, 2019.

            Sophie Esch, Rice University

            Yansi Pérez, Carleton College

10:00am PT・1:00pm ET

Book Presentation
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information to join the meeting.

Bethany Wiggin, Carolyn Fornoff, and Patricia Eunji Kim, eds. Timescales: Thinking across Ecological Temporalities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

            Bethany Wiggin (University of Pennsylvania)

            Carolyn Fornoff (University of Illinois Urbana Champaign)

            Patricia Eunji Kim (New York University)

11:00am PT・2:00pm ET

Film/Video Screenings
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information to join the meeting.
Moderators:  Julia Medina, University of San Diego and Karina Zelaya, Mississippi State University

Ballade vom kleinen Soldaten (La balada del pequeño soldado), 1984. 46 min
Directors: Werner Herzog and Denis Reichle. Sinopsis: This documentary examines the Miskito population in Nicaragua and their use of children soldiers in the conflict with the Sandinistas.

El canto de Bosawas, 2014, 52:35 min
Dir. Mision Bosawas/Mision videos. Sinopsis: El canto de Bosawas sique la aventura de Matute, miembro de la banda nicaragüense "La Cuneta Son Machin" que viaja junto a dos músicos de San Francisco a lo profundo de Bosawas, con el firme propósito de grabar por primera vez en la historia, la música de los indígenas Mayangnas.

Descubre el mapa bioculural del pueblo lenca El Salvador-Honduras, MiraizVision, 2007, 14:43 min
Un recorrido por el mapa biocultural de la región Lenca. Este esfuerzo fue parte del proyecto "Programa Binacional de Desarrollo Fronterizo Honduras - El Salvador" del Proyecto: Integración y Sostenibilidad del Pueblo Lenca a partir de su cosmovisión.

2:00pm PT・5:00pm ET

Transborder Experiences of Indigeneity: Land, Language, and Space among the Garifuna and Lenca Communities
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information to join the meeting.
Moderator: Nancy Perez, Humboldt State University

Karina Zelaya, Mississippi State University
"Defying Oblivion: The Lenca Women and the Community's Biocultural Map"

Douglas Carranza (California State University, Northridge)
"Crossing Boundaries: Language, Healing, and Migration among the Lenca"

Jennifer M. Gómez, University of Minnesota, Duluth
"Double Jeopardy: The Loss of Land Rights and the Loss of Language" 

4:00pm PT・7:00pm ET

Focusing on the Central American Atlantic
Click on the link above to join the meeting.
Moderator: Carolyn Fornoff, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign

Julia Medina (University of San Diego)
"Refracting Lenses on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua. Documenting Biospheres in the El ojo del tiburón and El canto de Bosawas."

Mauricio Espinoza (University of Cincinnati) / Tomás Emilio Arce (University of Cincinnati)
"Sea Turtles and Sea-Scapes: Representing Human-Nature Relations in the Central American Caribbean 

Leonel Delgado (Universidad de Chile)
"Fantasmas coloniales y representación documental: La visión sobre los miskitos en La balada del pequeño soldado (1984) de Werner Herzog y Denis Reichie" 

5:30pm PT・8:30pm ET

Objeto Antiguo
Kaqjay Moloj, Comunidad Kaqchikel de Investigación, FIEBRE Ediciones y Beatriz Cortez
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information to join the meeting.
Moderated by Daniela Lieja Quintanar, Curator, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE)

Kaqjay Moloj emerged in 2006 as a community initiative of professionals, students, farmers, youth, men and women in the Municipality of Patzicía, Guatemala. Its objective is to preserve the memory and history of the Kaqchikel and Maya communities. The Comunidad Kaqchikel de Investigación is a Maya Kaqchikel collective formed in 2016 as an extension of Kaqjay Moloj. Its members are social sciences students and professionals (history, anthropology and archaeology) interested in research about art and memory. Their objective is to establish a dialogue between local collective memory, ancient history of the Kaqchikel people and community practices, in order to contribute to the construction of the political autonomy of peoples. FIEBRE Ediciones is an artist and publishing independent collective established in 2016 by the Mexican artists Antonio Medina (Coahuila, 1990) and Carla Lamoyi (Mexico City, 1990). Their objective is to research and disseminate Latin American and Caribbean creative practices. Beatriz Cortez is a Salvadoran visual artist based in Los Angeles. Her work explores imaginaries of the future. Objeto Antiguo is their collective project, it will be on view at LACE as part of Intergalactix: against isolation, an exhibition at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions from May 15 to August 14, 2021.

Wednesday, April 7

9:30am PT・12:30pm ET

Memory of the Central American Diaspora in Los Angeles:  A Cultural Map
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information to join the meeting.
Yansi Pérez
Moderator: Nancy Perez, Humboldt State University

How do we relocate and reinvent the memory of a traumatic event in a new geography, language, and culture?  To think about memory linked to a new space, in this case Los Angeles, and to the Central American diaspora, we must consider the necessary reinvention that memory has to undergo in order to insert itself in a new culture and language as well as take into account the unresolved traumas and antagonisms that are part of the new space as well as the old one.  A research project by Yansi Pérez, Carleton College.

 11:00am PT・2:00pm ET

Cosmic Imaginaries: The Fiction of Alvaro Menén Desleal
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information to join the meeting.
Moderator: Karina Zelaya, Mississippi State University

Carolyn Fornoff (University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign)
"Alvaro Menen Desleal's Speculative Planetary Imagination"

Elizabeth Pérez Márquez (Universidad de Guadalajara, sistema virtual)
"Ser y morir en la era del posthumanismo en la obra de Álvaro Menén Desleal"

Ricardo Roque Baldovinos (Universidad Centroamericana "José Simeón Cañas", El Salvador)
"La ciudad como utiopía y distopía en la obra de Álvaro Menéndez Leal"

2:00pm PT・5:00pm ET

Poets from the Central American Diaspora
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information to join the meeting.
Moderator: Dr. Yansi Perez, Carleton College

Javier Zamora
Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and migrated to the US when he was nine. He was a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard and has been granted fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and Stanford University. Unaccompanied is his first collection. He lives in Harlem where he’s working on a memoir.

Susana Marcelo
Susana Marcelo is a Salvadoran-born, Los Angeles-raised writer whose work resists the division between the realm of memory, experience, and language. She has been recently published in Virginia Quarterly and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States. She is a professor at CSUN and LAVC.

3:30pm PT・6:30pm ET

Movimiento y pensamiento en la experiencia migrante afrocaribeña
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information to join the meeting.
Moderator: Valeria Grinberg Pla, Bowling Green State University

Francio Guadeloupe (University of Amsterdam / Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies) and Charissa Granger (University of the West Indies)
“Trans-Caribbean theorizing via Trance-Caribbean dance”

Amanda Alfaro Córdoba (Universidad de Costa Rica)
"La modernidad negativa y los antojos de Carl Rigby."

David Rocha (Universidad Centroamericana "José Simeón Cañas", El Salvador)
"De Granada a Managua: afrodescendientes, imaginarios urbanos y memorias familiares"

Lourdes Dávila (New York University)
"Entre Puerto Rico y Richmond. Women in Resistance" de Alicia Díaz

5:00pm PT・8:00pm ET

Borders of Freedom, 2020
Alexia Miranda, Sayre Quevedo, Guadalupe Maravilla, Fredy Solan, Crack Rodriguez, Abigail Reyes
Curated by Patricio Majano /Presented by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and Y.ES Contemporary

Borders of Freedom is a video exhibition featuring artists living in El Salvador and its diaspora, whose work addresses the concept of freedom from different perspectives, connecting it with intimacy, spirituality, gender, migration and sociopolitical context. Collectively, the works address the theme of freedom and consider what the artists identity as constraints of freedom and ways in which to deal with these issues. The exhibition aims to centralize creative dialogue by artists located in El Salvador as well as across the United States.

Sponsored by:

Bowling Green State University
California State University, Northridge
Carleton College
Humboldt State University
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions
Universidad Centroamericana "José Simeón Cañas", El Salvador
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Mississippi State University
University of San Diego
Y.ES Contemporary
Lucy and Isidore B. Adelman Foundation

Contact the Department of Central of Central American and Transborder Studies at donald.w.lilly@csun.edu for accessibility requests by Wednesday, March 31, 2021.

Click here for program.