#  Arts and Humanities Workshop | Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change 

 



    ![Arts & Humanities Workshop Series](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/styles/hwp_5_4__480x385/public/2024-09/Screenshot%202024-09-23%20at%2011.56.16%20AM.png?itok=N5xAgkNo) 

 



 

####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **November 6, 2024** 

 05:30PM - 07:30PM EST 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **CGIS South, Room S216**  



 

 



 

Please join us on a discussion of Carolyn Fornoff’s book, Subjunctive Aesthetics. Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change (Vanderbilt University Press, 2024). In it, Fornoff undergoes a fascinating analysis of how contemporary writers, filmmakers, and visual artists grapple with the threat that climate change and extractivist policies pose to Mexico’s present and future. Fornoff uses as a main source of conceptual interest the grammatical mode of the subjunctive, that articulates the imagined, desired, and possible, and that in Spanish is even more widely used to express doubts, denials, value judgments, and emotions. Whereas ecocritical studies have often focused on art's evidentiary role—its ability to visualize and prove the urgency of environmental damage—author Carolyn Fornoff argues that what unites the artists under consideration is their use of more hypothetical, uncertain representational modes, or "subjunctive aesthetics." In this way, she offers a thought-provoking set of texts that delve with how, in the context of an escalated extractive concessions frenzy coming out of Mexican contemporary politics, cultural productions activate approaches to the planet not just as it is, but as it could be or should be. \*Please download and read the attached PDF (introduction and chapter 2 of the book) before the workshop.

Speaker: **Carolyn Fornoff**, Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies, Cornell University

Moderated by: **Alejandra Vela**, Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University and **Mariano Siskind**, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University.

**About the Speaker**

**Carolyn Fornoff** is Assistant Professor of Latin American studies at Cornell University. Her work examines how Mexican and Central American cultural production responds to environmental crisis. Her first monograph, Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change, was published in 2024 with Vanderbilt University Press’ Critical Mexican Studies series. She is also the co-editor of two volumes in the environmental humanities: Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema (SUNY Press, 2021).

**About the Series**

The Arts & Humanities Workshop Series fosters scholarly discussions centered on the work of leading academics in the fields of the Arts & Humanities.



 

 



 

 See also:- [ Cambridge ](/locations/cambridge-office)
- [ Arts & Humanities Workshop ](/programs-initiatives/arts-sciences-workshop)
 
 

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