Literature

× Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Mystical Martyrs and Hidden Remains: Puerto Rico's Turbulent 1950s

Dr. Juan Diego Mariátegui
Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Puerto Rico emerged from the 1950s transformed. By 1952, governor Luis Muñoz Marín inaugurated the Free Associated State, a new legal status that ostensibly ended Puerto Rico’s colonial subordination as a “non-incorporated territory” of the United States. Another key development in these heady years was the Korean War (1950-1953), in which 61,000 Puerto Rican soldiers participated. This conflict was crucial because it allowed Muñoz Marín to present Puerto Rico as an exemplary defender of capitalist democracy and thereby discursively support its colonial relationship with the United States. But there is a parallel war that occurred in this period: the armed insurrection known as the Jayuya Uprising that Pedro Albizu Campos and the pro-independence Nationalist Party launched as a response to the Free Associated State. This talk centers on two opposed visions of war, a nationalist one and a neo-imperialist one. Through the speeches of governor Luis Muñoz Marín, poems by the Nationalist mystic Francisco Matos Paoli, and a short story by pro-independence author José Luis González, I explore how literary representations of these armed conflicts formed different anti-colonialist cultural and political subjectivities at a time when the island’s commitment to the U.S. was enshrined.

Juan Diego Mariátegui is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Lehigh University. Prior to that he received a PhD in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies from the University of Chicago as well as a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Hispanic Studies from Brown University. His teaching and research focus on modern Puerto Rican and Cuban literature, particularly the way literary representations of space explore the relationship between man and the natural world, the cultural dimensions of colonialism, and the tensions between citizenship and diaspora. 

× Monday, February 17, 2025

Poetics of Maroonage: Posthuman Spaces in Hispanophone Caribbean Poetry

Dr. Ethel Barja Cuyutupa
Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
This presentation will discuss twenty-first century poetry by two Afro-Hispanophone Caribbean poets, Mayra Santos-Febres from Puerto Rico and Soleida Ríos from Cuba, to underline how their poetry imagines futures under threatening circumstances such as forced displacement and anti-blackness. How does the longue durée of Black resistance influence twenty-first-century poetics?

Dr. Ethel Barja Cuyutupa will present her research, which takes place through an interdisciplinary approach in between history and poetics and in dialogue with scholars interested in how lyric language is historically inflicted and intertwined with social justice and Blackness. The intertwining of imagery of long-lasting Black resistance and the emotional and political dimensions of the posthuman lyric subject ensures the poetics of maroonage exposes transhistorical genealogies of hope.

Ethel Barja is a scholar, educator, and award-winning poet originally from the Andes, Peru. She holds a PhD in Hispanic Studies from Brown University and an MA in Hispanic literary Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is an Assistant Professor in the Modern Languages and Intercultural Studies Department at Salisbury University. Her research focuses on transnational and interdisciplinary approaches to Hispanophone Caribbean, Andean, and Latinx literature, integrating critical Indigenous studies, Afro-poetics, gender, and posthuman studies. She is the author of the monograph titled Poesía e insurrección: La Revolución cubana en el imaginario latinoamericano. Her poetry collections include Insomnio Vocal, Hope is Tanning on a Nudist Beach, and La Muda.