On Wednesday 20 March 2019 at 13:30 (Room 417j, 4th Floor, New Faculty of Philosophy Building) Dr. Maria José Canelo (Assistant Professor of English and American Studies, University of Coimbra) will deliver a presentation with the title “Issues of Representation and Power in Visual Culture Studies.”
Please find the presenter’s bio and
presentation abstract below.
Problematics Seminar Co-ordinators
(Dr. E. Botonaki and Dr. T. Rapatzikou)
Title: Issues of representation and power in visual culture studies
Abstract:
This seminar will bring into debate a series of theoretical concepts central to cultural and visual studies such as vision, visuality, and countervisuality (Mirzoeff 2011; 2015; 2017), through the analysis of a number of photographs relating to the emergence in the U.S. public sphere of undocumented immigrants, on the one hand, and the Black Lives Matter social movement, on the other. Adding to the discussion will be notions of subalternity and speech (Spivak 1988) and the abyssal line (Santos 2007). We will reflect upon issues of representation, resistance, vision, and agency. The goal of the investigation will be how reading images can identify emancipatory practices of self-representation in the public sphere.
Bibliography:
Mirzoeff, Nicholas (2011). The Right to Look. A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham: Duke UP, 2011.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas (2015). How to See the World. N.p.: Penguin/Random House, 2015.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas (2017). The Appearance of Black Lives Matter [Online book, downloadable at:www.namepublications.org] 22.11.2018.
Spivak, Gayatri [1985]. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory. A Reader. Eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. NY: Columbia: UP. 1993.
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (2007), “Beyond Abyssal Thinking. From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges.”Review XXX.1: 45-89.
Bio:
Maria José Canelo is assistant professor of English and American Studies at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Coimbra (UC), where she has been teaching both undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Cultural Studies, American Studies, Interamerican Studies and American Literature. She is also full researcher at the Center for Social Studies (CES–UC), where she has also been the editor of one of the online journal ecadernos CES. Her interests gather around issues of cultural citizenship, nationalism, difference, representation, visuality, literary magazines, cultural and literary studies, and interculturality. She was a Fulbright student at New York University, where she completed her doctorate in American Studies ('Carey McWilliams and the question of cultural citizenship in the 1940s'), after finishing her master’s in Anglo-American Studies at the University of Coimbra with a thesis on modernist 'little' magazines from a comparative perspective. Her latest publications include: “Nations in Review(s): modernist ‘little’ magazines and the (trans)national imagination”, Comparative Literature Studies 55.3 (2018); “Lessons in transnationalism as a framework of knowledge in the critiques of José Martí, Randolph Bourne, Herbert Bolton, and Waldo Frank” The Edge of One of Many Circles (book chapter; 2017) and “Producing Good Neighbors: Carmen Miranda’s body as spectacular pan-Americanism,” Révue Française d´Etudes Americaines 139 (2014/2).
