ALARI Seminar on Afro-Latin American Studies: Aesthetic Archives of Cuba’s Second Slavery

The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil and Spain 1868-1968 (Northwestern University Press, 2014) tracks a shift away from concerns with sovereignty to an interest in things in Iberian Atlantic literature and art. The book reveals how Cuban, Brazilian, and Spanish concrete aesthetics—art and writing concerned with materiality, including the mid-century movements of concrete poetry and neoconcrete art—drew on both global forms of constructivism and on Atlantic histories of slavery, empire, and media technologies. Analyzing Jose Marti’s notebooks, Joaquim de Sousandrade’s poetry, Ramiro de Maeztu’s essays on things and on slavery, 1920s Cuban literature on economic restructuring, Ferreira Gullar’s theory of the “non-object,” and neoconcrete art, among other works, the book shows how a turn to objects—and from these to new media networks—was rooted in the very philosophies of history that helped form the Atlantic world itself.

Speaker:
Rachel Price (B.A., Yale; Ph.D., Duke University) works on Latin American, circum-Atlantic, and particularly Cuban literature and culture. Her research explores topics such as media, slavery, poetics, environmental humanities, and visual art. She is currently completing a book-length study on media during the height of slavery and anti-slavery insurgency in nineteenth-century Cuba.

Moderator:
Alejandro de la Fuente is the Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics; Professor of African and African American Studies and of History; and Director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University.

This event is co-sponsored by the Afro-Latin American Research Institute (ALARI).