Spanish Department

Come watch “Opening the Earth: the Potato King,” a documentary directed by Aaron Ebner, MIIS alum and founder of the Andean Alliance for Sustainable Development. This screening will be followed by a virtual moderated Q&A with food studies professor Molly Anderson. Filmed in Peru, the documentary centers on the story of “the guardian of biodiversity,” farmer Julio Hancco, and how his necessary agricultural work is at odds with our modernizing work.

What is the relation between political and social trauma and the arts? Can we think on artistic creation as a form of personal and collective resistance? How does art become a privileged and powerful medium that bear witness to the traumatic events of the past? This lecture will address these questions and the responses that through artistc creation are given to the complex issues of violence, memory and its subjective and social dimension after Argentina´s last and most brutal dictatorship (1976-1983). Focusing on visual art, film and literature, Prof.

How do we map relations across the Afro-Atlantic? How do the diasporic cultural productions of the sole Spanish-speaking nation in Subsaharan Africa connect with works emerging from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, The Dominican Republic)? What insights do we gain by reading these contemporary works alongside each other? This talk will examine the long history of Atlantic crossings between Equatorial Guinea and the Latinx Caribbean and engage in a robust discussion about colonialism, diaspora, feminisms, decolonization, literature, and the human.