Announcing the Inaugural ALS Seminar Symposium

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

4:00pm-7:30pm

Humanities 108

The ALS faculty invites all English Department graduate students and faculty to participate in the inaugural ALS seminar symposium and reception. The event brings together Dr. Vizcaíno-Alemán's English 610: Critical Regionalism and Dr. Coleman's English 660: Race and the African American Novel to discuss selected seminar readings with all attendees.

This year's symposium facilitates an understanding of critical regionalism through selections from Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk; Gilroy's The Black Atlantic; Stecopoulos' Reconstructing the World; an article on bell hooks and another on the global west.

Dr. Krista Comer, associate professor at Rice University, former Western Literature Association president, and leading scholar of critical regionalism, will cap the event with a lecture titled:

"Thinking Otherwise across Global Wests:

Issues of Mobility and Feminist Critical Regionalism”

All attendees are expected to read the material and are invited to participate in discussion. The following readings can be found on e-reserve: 

http://ereserves.unm.edu/eres/courseindex.aspx?&page=search

Course: ENGL610; password: lobo610

• Du Bois, "Of the Black Belt" and "Of the Coming of John" from The Souls of Black Folk;
• Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (selection)
• Stecopoulos, Reconstructing the World (selection)
• Comer, "The Problem of the Critical in Global Wests”

An additional reading can be found online:

• Christina Van Houten, "bell hooks, Critical Regionalism, and the Politics of Ecological Returns”http://politicsandculture.org/2014/03/09/bell-hooks-critical-regionalism-and-the-politics-of-ecological-returns-by-christina-van-houten/

Schedule:

• 4:00-5:45pm--Welcome and facilitated discussion
• 5:45-6:00pm--Break and refreshments
• 6:00-7:30pm--Lecture, Q&A, and light reception

Food and refreshments will be available at the event.

Sponsored by the English Department, the Center for Regional Studies, and the English Graduate Student Association

Contact: Dr. Jesse Alemán 

jman@unm.edu

Alemán publishes chapter on teaching nineteenth-century US Latino/a literatures

Jesse Alemán’s chapter, “Recovered and Recovery Texts of the Nineteenth Century,” leads off Latino/a Literature in the Classroom: Twenty-First-Century Approaches to Teaching, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and recently published by Routledge. The essay is a scholarly piece on teaching nineteenth-century US Latino/a literatures, surveying major texts to be included in the classroom, presenting approaches to themes, genres, and authors that structure the Latino nineteenth century, and most importantly, arguing for a different model of teaching American literary history to be inclusive of early US Latino/a print cultures.

Anita Obermeier publishes article on Merlin's Devil Conception in Arthuriana's special volume dedicated to "Arthur on the Stage."

In her most recent article, “Merlin’s Conception by Devil in William Rowley’s Play The Birth of Merlin” (Arthuriana 24.4 (2014): 48-79), Anita Obermeier argues that Rowley’s early modern play amalgamates both the medieval Galfridian-based and Francophone narratives of Merlin’s conception by daemon, incubus, and devil in order to engage contemporary early seventeenth-century debates on the devil’s influence in the world, to ventriloquize social commentary via the figure of the Clown, and to have Merlin hail Prince Charles as the future Arthur.

Baker Named the 2015-16 Center for Regional Studies Hector Torres Fellow

W. Oliver Baker, an American Literary Studies Ph.D. candidate in the University of New Mexico English Department, has been awarded the 2015-2016 Center for Regional Studies Hector Torres Fellowship.

Baker earned both his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. In his master's program, Baker studied American literature, rhetoric and composition, while also serving as a graduate instructor, teaching and assisting with writing, literature, and film courses. Baker joined the UNM English Department in the fall of 2012. Baker’s areas of study include nineteenth and twentieth century American literature, Critical Theory, Marxist Cultural Theory, and Pedagogy. He also works as a UNM Graduate instructor in Core writing, a Freshman Learning Communities instructor, and teaches courses on American and World literature.

Baker will use the CRS Torres Fellowship to research and draft his dissertation, tentatively titled, “Literatures of Dispossession: Representing U.S. Settler Colonialism in the Late Nineteenth Century,” which examines how American literature from mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century offers a cultural history of a key period in the development and expansion of U.S. settler colonialism. The dissertation highlights the role of settler colonialism as a structure of dispossession and its relationship to the processes of U.S. industrialization and monopoly capitalism. In particular, Baker focuses on the works of Indigenous, African American, and Mexican American writers of this period, demonstrating how the form and style of their writings register the uneven development and structural violence of settler colonialism and capitalist expansion in North America. Dr. Jesse Alemán directs the dissertation.

The CRS Hector Torres Fellowship, a $10,000-$15,000 stipend, was inaugurated in 2010 by the University of New Mexico’s Center for Regional Studies in memory of the English Department’s slain colleague. The fellowship supports graduate research and scholarship in the English Department directly related to the late Dr. Torres’ fields, as well as the mission of the Center for Regional Studies. Areas include Chicano/a literary and cultural studies; theory (i.e. Marxism; post-structuralism; deconstruction; psychoanalysis; and globalization); film studies; and scholarship related to the mission of the CRS, including history; archival research; literature; and other interdisciplinary fields related to New Mexico, the US-Mexico borderlands, and the greater southwest.

Daniel Worden’s edited volume The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World published by the University Press of Mississippi

Daniel Worden’s latest book, an edited collection of essays titled The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World, has just been published by the University Press of Mississippi. The book also features an essay by UNM English PhD Candidate Ann D’Orazio.

The Comics of Joe Sacco addresses the range of his award-winning work, from his early comics stories as well as his ground-breaking journalism Palestine (1993) and Safe Area to Gorade (2000), to Footnotes in Gaza (2009) and his most recent book The Great War (2013), a graphic history of World War I.

First in the new series Critical Approaches to Comics Artists, this edited volume explores Sacco's comics journalism, and features established and emerging scholars from comics studies, cultural studies, geography, literary studies, political science, and communication studies. Sacco's work has already found a place in some of the foundational scholarship in comics studies, and this book solidifies his role as one of the most important comics artists today.

Sections focus on how Sacco's comics journalism critiques and employs the "standard of objectivity" in mainstream reporting, what aesthetic principles and approaches to lived experience can be found in his comics, how Sacco employs the space of the comics page to map history and war, and the ways that his comics function in the classroom and as human rights activism. The Comics of Joe Sacco offers definitive, exciting approaches to some of the most important--and necessary--comics today, by one of the most acclaimed journalist-artists of our time.  

The book is available through booksellers everywhere, and here:  http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1764

ALS PhD Student W. Oliver Baker wins the Michael Sprinker Essay Prize

W. Oliver Baker’s essay “The Materialism of Violence and the Politics of Recognition in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian” has won the Michael Sprinker Prize, a national essay competition hosted by the Marxist Literary Group and the editors of the journal Mediations. The Michael Sprinker award recognizes an essay or dissertation chapter that engages with Marxist theory, scholarship, pedagogy, and/or activism. The winner receives a prize of $500 and automatic entry of the essay into the peer review process for the journal Mediations. Commenting on Oliver’s essay, the judges “agreed, with very little quibbling of any kind, that [it] was the most original and publishable submission we received.  We were especially impressed with the elegance with which the essay managed to be a critique both of the new materialisms and of the McCarthy novel.” 

Oliver’s essay argues that Blood Meridian represents the history of settler colonial violence in the form of a productive materialism or “object-oriented” aesthetic, and that in so doing forecloses a view of colonialism as a structure of capitalist violence. By representing settler colonial domination in positive terms as an “event” or “stage” of violence rather than in negative terms as a structure of dispossession, what Marx called “primitive accumulation,” McCarthy’s novel participates in a politics of neoliberal recognition whereby settler subjects of today “recognize” and reconcile colonialist violence of the past as a way not to acknowledge the role it still plays in contemporary forms of global capitalism that continue to dispossess and bring violence against Indigenous peoples of the world.

Oliver recently completed his third year as a PhD student in American Literary Studies. After passing his comprehensive exams last spring, Oliver is now working toward defending his dissertation prospectus after which he will begin his dissertation work this coming fall. 

More information about Mediations and the MLG can be found here: http://www.mediationsjournal.org/

Alemán Delivers Burke Lecture in Taos

As the 2015 Jim and Linda Burke Visiting Scholar in Literature at the Doel Reed Center for the Arts in Taos, Dr. Jesse Alemán delivered a lecture on Southwestern horror in film at the Taos Art Museum and Fechin House. Read more about it below in Laura Bulkin's article from the Taos Tempo:

Taos lecture: 'From Atomic Ants to Texas Cannibals'

What do giant radioactive ants have in common with inbred feral cannibals? How has our post-atomic Southwestern culture shaped the horror movie genre? And is it really aliens taking away our cattle, or could there be more sinister economic agents at work?

These questions and more will be addressed in a lively presentation by University of New Mexico-Albuquerque professor Dr. Jesse Alemán on Sunday (May 31), 2 p.m. at the Taos Art Museum at Fechin House, 227 Paseo del Pueblo Norte.

The event is titled “From Atomic Ants to Texas Cannibals: The Social Significance of Southwestern Horror in Film,” and is being offered free of charge by Oklahoma State University’s Doel Reed Center for the Arts in Taos.

The Doel Reed Center came about through the generosity of late Taos icon Martha Reed, whose famed broomstick skirts have adorned fashionable dancers from Taos to the White House.

“Martha was an alumna of Oklahoma State, and her father Doel taught art there,” said center director Dr. Edward Walkiewicz. “When she passed in 2010, she left us her property, including her father’s old art studio, with the stipulation that it be used for arts and humanities.”

Alemán will discuss “the way specific events that take place in the Southwest show up in horror films — environmental and economic disasters generating forms of horror.” He gives the example of “Them,” a 1954 release considered one of the pioneers of the “nuclear monster” genre. “Them” is set in Alamagordo, New Mexico, site of the first atomic bomb test — an environmental nightmare that, in the film, spawns an army of giant mutant ants.

As well as atomic events, Alemán will cover the economic horror story of the demise of cattle culture. He posits a direct line of cinematic influence, from the 1963 cattle-industry drama “Hud,” to 1970s horror classics such as “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “The Hills Have Eyes,” where the cannibal antagonists have been left in social and economic isolation by the decline of the cattle economy.

This rich vein of material ties in with another field of expertise for Alemán: Chicano folklore, especially as it is translated into the medium of film. “We could look at low-brow horror movies as just campy or simplistic, but this genre of subaltern forms has a long history of articulating complex social messages.”

He gives the example of the many “chupacabra films” that have been made in Mexico and the U.S. over the years, and points to a metaphorical subtext of “blood-sucking labor practices and exploitation of workers” underlying the chupacabra’s vampirism.

La Llorona, “The Weeping Woman,” has also been a favorite horror-genre theme, with Mexican Llorona films dating back to the 1930s. Alemán spoke of the differences between the character of La Llorona as she has traditionally been passed down in stories from elders to children, and the way that the character has been portrayed cinematically.

“I love the fact that she’s in film and doesn’t have to be the same as she is in folklore. Many of the Mexican movies add the element of La Llorona possessing the body of someone, often a white woman. This never happens in the folklore stories, it was completely made up for cinema. With this added element of ‘possession,’ you wonder, what’s up with that, what does that mean? Who is possessing and owning whom, and why? There are profound metaphors here for the possession of land, the possession of culture and power and property.”

“There is also a tradition of zombies in horror films representing ‘racial others’ who will suck life from the dominant culture,” Alemán continued, citing the 1996 cult film “From Dusk Till Dawn.”

“That film captured those tensions in its very structure. It’s a Quentin Tarantino film until the Tarantino character dies, and then we get Robert Rodriguez’ perspective and it’s a different point of view on the genre. This was set in a trucker bar, and made at the very beginning of NAFTA. Who are the real vampires— the Mexicans in the film, or the corporate entities about to come swarming in?”

Alemán grew up in a small town in rural California, and says his upbringing there, in a region he describes as “98 percent raza,” helps him feel at home teaching in Albuquerque. “The work I’m doing now is a synthesis of all the cultural impressions I took in as a kid, filtered through rigorous academic mentoring and training in thinking analytically.”

While in Taos, Alemán will also be interacting with OSU professor Martin Wallen’s intensive two-week course on the subject of “The Nuclear Bomb and the Land of Enchantment.” Wallen says the class will be visiting Los Alamos, “along with the sites of peaceful artistic engagement, such as the Fechin House and the Greater World Earthships.”

“This is the third summer that we’re hosting a visiting scholar,” said Walkiewicz. “We do a nationwide search for the person with the best credentials who can also contribute to a class. Jesse Alemán already has a great body of work in Southwestern culture and contemporary film, and in how that ties in to social and economic issues.”

Later this year, the Center will be taking part in the Pressing Through Time exhibition. This celebration of printmaking in Taos will encompass 150 years of work, including that of Doel Reed himself. “We are always trying to participate in the artistic and intellectual life of the community, and to bring in more than we take out,” Walkiewicz said.

For Sunday’s event, Alemán assures attendees that they won’t be subjected to a typical dry lecture. He’ll be showing clips from the films as he speaks about them, and then will invite the audience to join in what he hopes will be a spirited discussion. “It’s about the power of folklore. Some may view it as mythology. For us, it is articulating how we live all the time.”

For more, call the museum at (575) 758-2690.