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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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