Literature

× Monday, February 3, 2025

Big Chop: Race, Trauma, and Refusal in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Shenny De Los Angeles’ “The Ritual to Beauty”

Gisabel Leonardo
Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
In Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Lola explores her contentious relationship with her mother, childhood trauma, and racial identity through hair. Similarly, Shenny De Los Angeles’ autobiographical documentary short “The Ritual to Beauty” explores themes of race, gender, and haircare through intimate interviews with Shenny’s mother and grandmother. These women turn to haircare as a site of expression to address the trauma they and the women before them have endured. In critical moments of release, both Lola and Shenny shave their heads in complete refusal of the Dominican aesthetics of race that promote hair straightening. In a Dominican context, the “Big Chop”—as this is often referred to in anglophone cultures—conjures a negative affect that mirrors the traumatic memory of El Corte, or The Parsley Massacre (1937), when tens of thousands of Haitians were slaughtered at the hands of Dominican armed forces. The works explored here confront the racial terror of the corte to heal generational trauma rooted in an anti-Black aesthetic imaginary. Through literature and visual media, this talk explores the nuances and consequences of the “chop” as an act of aesthetic refusal and an affirmation of Dominican Blackness.

Gisabel Leonardo is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese with a graduate minor in Latina/o Studies. Her interdisciplinary work centers expressions of gender, race, and sexuality through performance in contemporary Dominican and diasporic Dominican literary, artistic, and musical cultures. While at Illinois, she had the pleasure of designing and facilitating language, literature, culture, and media studies courses at several levels of instruction while also serving as a Graduate College Fellow and a Humanities Research Institute Predoctoral Fellow. Her teaching and research interests aim to center the cultural and literary production of marginalized voices across the Hispanophone Caribbean and its US diaspora. Her current work Melenas Malcriadas: The Black Aesthetics of Hair and Dominicanidad examines the conflicting affects of the Dominican hair salon and how Dominican hair culture is reproduced and reimagined in music, literature, and art.

× Tuesday, February 4, 2025

Yŏdaesaeng Reclaimed: Rewriting Identity and Resistance in 1950s and 1960s Postwar Women’s Narratives

Monica W. Cho
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
This talk illuminates the troubling figure of the postwar yŏdaesaeng (female college student) in two short stories: Han Mu-suk’s “Abyss with Emotions” (Kamjŏngi innŭn simyŏn, 1957) and Son So-hŭi’s “The Sunlight of That Day” (Kunalŭi haetbitŭn, 1960). Yŏdaesaeng encapsulates the troubling memories of Japanese colonialism and the Korean War, as well as principles of the postwar ideologies within her youthful college-educated body in the two stories. I discuss the yŏdaesaeng by first historicizing her colonial progenitor, yŏhaksaeng (schoolgirl), to historically contextualize the Han and Son’s experiences as yŏhaksaeng. I also touch on how colonial writers have mobilized the yŏhaksaeng figure and their descent into madness as fictional representations of modernity and ethnonationalism. In examining Han and Son’s postwar yŏdaesaeng and their descent into madness as both an escape from censorship and as a method of radical resistance against patriarchy, this talk shows how postwar women writers reclaim the exploited figure of the yŏhaksaeng and their madness by rejecting the very use of national representation by focusing on yŏdaesaeng’s feminine desires and experiences. This kind of writing practice has allowed women writers to recuperate their own autonomy as writers, women, and yŏhaksaeng-pasts in the immediate postwar era.

× 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.