Mar 8, 2017
JCB Fellow's Talk: Guadalupe García
Guadalupe García (Tulane University), John Carter Brown Library Associates Fellow "City of Light and Shadow: Reading and Mapping Havana's Atlantic Geographies"
4pm – 5pm Macmillan Reading Room
Events from our Partners
Mar 7, 2017
Colloquium and Roundtable: European rhetoric and images for the Americas: The world of Diego Valadés, Franciscan artist and humanist
Join us for a colloquium and roundtable discussion with participants including Linda Báez Rubí (Berlin/UNAM Mexico), Byron Hamann (Ohio State University), Andrew Laird (Brown University), Jeffrey Muller (Brown University) and Ken Ward (John Carter Brown Library). The first half of the program (3:00-4:30) will take place in the conference room of the JCB. The second half of the program (4:45-6:30), including a show & tell, will take place in the MacMillan Reading Room.
3pm – 6:30pm MacMillan Reading Room.
Mar 2–12, 2017
In the Heights
Brown University Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies and Sock & Buskin present their first show of the spring semester 2017. In The Heights conceived by Lin-Manuel Miranda (the man behind the Hamilton phenomenon) runs March 2 through 12 in Stuart Theatre on the main campus at Brown University. In The Heights tells the universal story of a vibrant Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican community in New York City’s Washington Heights neighborhood—a place where the coffee from the bodega is light and sweet, the windows are always open, and the streets explode with the songs and rhythms of three generations. It’s a community on the brink of change, full of hopes, dreams, and pressures, where the biggest struggles can be deciding which traditions you take with you, and which ones you leave behind. In The Heights is the winner of the 2008 Tony Awards for Best Musical, Best Score, Best Choreography, and Best Orchestrations.
Stuart Theatre
Mar 2–12, 2017
In the Heights
Brown University Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies and Sock & Buskin present their first show of the spring semester 2017. In The Heights conceived by Lin-Manuel Miranda (the man behind the Hamilton phenomenon) runs March 2 through 12 in Stuart Theatre on the main campus at Brown University. In The Heights tells the universal story of a vibrant Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican community in New York City’s Washington Heights neighborhood—a place where the coffee from the bodega is light and sweet, the windows are always open, and the streets explode with the songs and rhythms of three generations. It’s a community on the brink of change, full of hopes, dreams, and pressures, where the biggest struggles can be deciding which traditions you take with you, and which ones you leave behind. In The Heights is the winner of the 2008 Tony Awards for Best Musical, Best Score, Best Choreography, and Best Orchestrations.
Stuart Theatre
Feb 24, 2017
Apprentice, Pauper, Coolie, Convict: Laboring Subjects and the Global Plantation Complex in the 19th Century
Kris Manjapra, Tufts University
3pm – 4:30pm Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute
Feb 23, 2017
Brazil Initiative Spring 2017 Film Series - Girimunho (Swirl, 2011)
The Brazil Initiative's Spring Film Series presents a selection of classic and contemporary films straight out of "another Brazil": the vast and rich world of the country's backlands. This "magical and moving" first feature, somewhere between ethnography and reverie, tells the story of Bastú, an old woman in the arid north of Minas Gerais set adrift after the death of her husband. View a trailer here.
7:30 p.m. - 9:30 p.m. Juokowsky Forum
Feb 22, 2017
Andrea Allen - Violence, Passion, and Power: Lesbian Women and Cultural Ideologies in Brazil
In this presentation, I will discuss the ways in which Brazilian lesbian women both disturb and reinscribe Brazilian cultural mores surrounding sexuality, gender roles, and violence. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Salvador da Bahia, I will argue that unlike heterosexual women, Brazilian lesbian women are able to embody cultural norms that emphasize sexual dominance and sexual freedom as integral aspects of Brazilian male authority, privilege, and even Brazilian identity as a whole. Nevertheless, they are also made invisible as citizens who are deemed worthy of full protection and consideration when they are victims of intimate partner violence and seek redress from the state.
12:00 p.m. - 1:30 p.m. Juokowsky Forum
Feb 16, 2017
Brazil Initiative Spring 2017 Film Series - Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (Black God, White Devil, 1964)
The Brazil Initiative's Spring Film Series presents a selection of classic and contemporary films straight out of "another Brazil": the vast and rich world of the country's backlands. Glauber Rocha's legendary depiction of messianic fervor in the Bahian backlands, operatically intertwining references to the slaughter of the Canudos War, the immemorial desperation of the country's peasants, and the workings of law and violence, is a monument in the history of Brazil's Cinema Novo. Named one of the ten best Brazilian films of all time by the Brazilian Association of Film Critics. View a trailer here.
7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. Juokowsky Forum
Feb 16, 2017
Café, té y pan dulce
Come and meet members of the Hispanic Studies faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, teaching assistants, and staff at this casual event. OIP staff will also be present to answer questions about study abroad, and best of all there will be snacks and warm beverages!
1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Rochambeau Music Room, 84 Prospect Street.
Feb 15, 2017
The Emergence of the PRI: Land, Civil Society, and Party Formation in Post-Revolutionary Mexico
Mexico's Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) was central to one of the longest-lived regimes of the twentieth century. Yet, the PRI’s emergence remains severely understudied in a body of work devoted mostly to explaining how the party maintained power once it was consolidated. I examine why the PRI formed as a mass party in some regions but not others despite attempts to do so and similarity in conditions. In doing so I test prevailing approaches to the understanding of party formation that conceive mass parties as reflections of pre-constituted social sectors or as an after-effect of modernizing states. The talk will develop a two-pronged argument: the emergence of mass parties requires the existence of a strong civil society upon which to act; in turn, the presence of this civil societal realm is facilitated by the collapse of ‘pre’-capitalist land tenure arrangements. In contrast to prevailing approaches, I show the power of the party to shape and construct political constituencies and engage in state-formation itself; at the same time, by showing the role of property arrangements, I identify structural determinants to the capacity for political organizations to produce constituents. Edwin F. Ackerman is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the Maxwell School in Syracuse University.
4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. McKinney Conference Room
Feb 14, 2017
Brazil Initiative Spring 2017 Film Series - Serras da desordem (The Hills of Disorder, 2006)
The Brazil Initiative's Spring Film Series presents a selection of classic and contemporary films straight out of "another Brazil": the vast and rich world of the country's backlands. This dizzying blend of documentary and recreation – described as a cinematic "UFO" in recent Brazilian production – plunges viewers into the story of Carapiru, a Native man who wandered through the Brazilian hinterland for a decade after the slaughter of his tribe, the Awá-Guajá. View a trailer here.
7pm – 9pm Juokowsky Forum
Feb 14 – Apr 6, 2017
Brazil Initiative Spring Film Series 2017
Running from February through April of 2017, the Brazil Initiative's Spring Film Series presents a selection of seven films, some classic and some contemporary, straight out of "another Brazil": the vast and rich world of the country's backlands. This series serves as a reminder of the continued importance of rural Brazil to Brazilian history, culture and art in a country of an increasingly urbanized population. All films have English-language subtitles.
Juokowsky Forum
Feb 14, 2017
Felipe Loureiro - The Alliance for Progress For A Few? US Economic Aid to Brazil’s States during the Administration of João Goulart (1961-1964)
The presentation investigates the allocation of U.S. aid and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) loans to Brazilian states during the government of João Goulart in Brazil (1961-1964). Scholars have long emphasized that John F. Kennedy's Alliance for Progress has employed state-by-state loans and grants as Cold War weapons to destabilize the Goulart regime, even though references on the subject were imprecise or based on few cases. U.S. officials have always denied such practices, claiming that aid was provided based on technical assessments. By using a broad range of sources, including a comprehensible database of U.S. and IDB dollar loans to Brazil’s states in the 1961-1964 period, the presentation points to their unequivocal political motivation. Washington clearly favored anticommunist and anti-Goulart governors in aid allocation, applying economic assistance to restrain Goulart’s power, set out a political alternative to the 1965 presidential elections, and constitute a coalition to collaborate in Goulart’s overthrow if it were needed. The presentation also claims that Brazilian governors played a crucial role in fostering and blocking U.S. state-by-state aid; and that Washington used assistance as a long-term instrument to stimulate a process of liberal capitalist modernization in Brazil, uprooting conditions for the proliferation of radical ideologies. The analyses of the patterns of U.S. state-by-state aid in Brazil shed light not only on how Alliance funds assisted to destabilize the country’s post-war democracy, but also contributes to a broader understanding of the Alliance for Progress in Latin America.
12:00 p.m. - 1:30 p.m. Juokowsky Forum
Feb 9, 2017
Poetics of Globalization: Airports and Aircraft as Significant Narrative Spaces in Contemporary Hispanic literature
Presentation by Erica Durante, Visiting Professor of Hispanic Studies, Brown University. In the past three decades, prominent Hispanic authors have been concerned with cultural and anthropological patterns introduced by the process of globalization, and in particular mobility, nomadism, fluid identity, and hyperconnectivity. My lecture will analyze the treatment of two paradigmatic spaces of our globalized world - airports and aircraft – by some major Spanish and Latin American writers and filmmakers (Fresán, Fuguet, Gamboa, Muñoz Molina, Roncagliolo, Torres Blandina, as well as Almodóvar and Szifrón). Despite Augé’s concept of “non-places”, I will argue that airports and aircraft are significant narrative spaces, defining an original chronotope peculiar to contemporary fiction. Conducted in Spanish.
5:30 p.m. - 6:30 p.m. Rochambeau Music Room, 84 Prospect Street.
Feb 2 – Apr 30, 2017
Women of the Page
The call to convent life drew women throughout the early modern Spanish world, from Madrid to Mexico City and Manila. For all the strictures these institutions placed upon their inhabitants, they also gave women opportunities to pursue vocations of the spirit and the mind. Within convent walls, Teresa of Ávila inaugurated her groundbreaking religious reform, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz composed some of the most ingenious poems in the Spanish language, and innumerable women wrote powerful accounts of their religious journeys. Curated by Tanya Tiffany, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and former JCB fellow, Women of the Page showcases the John Carter Brown Library’s extraordinary collection of images and books centered on nuns and convent life across Spain and its empire. Women of the Page will be on view February through April 2017.
John Carter Brown Library