This year, the Council of Graduate Students has partnered with the Minnesota Student Association to create a Teaching Award designed specifically to honor graduate student instructors and TAs who excel at making a difference in the lives of their students. This is the first time this award has been given out, and 12 finalists were selected out of roughly 200 nominations. We are proud to say that 2 of those 12 finalists were from the Department of Spanish & Portuguese Studies! Daniela Goldfine (Hispanic Literatures and Cultures Ph.D. Candidate) was selected as one of 4 award recipients, and Meghann Peace (Hispanic Linguistics Ph.D. Candidate) was an award finalist. Congratulations, Daniela and Meghann!

Daniela Goldfine
One of Daniela's student nominees wrote: "Within the class, each student had to lead the group in discussion twice over the course of the semester. This gave every student the opportunity to interact with the course readings on a personal level, manage a classroom and practice their oral Spanish skills in front of the group....The community that she created with our class made us feel comfortable with each other and encouraged us to share openly with the rest of the class."

Another nominee shared: "Daniela is very patient....She is always there with a smile and that word that we just can't help but say in English just so we can stop stuttering and get through the sentence. You can tell that she knows us each individually and wants to help us each get better in our own way. I am a firm believer that professors should be able to tailor each lesson to her class....Daniela does just that." "Her patience. I can't shout it loud enough how great of a teacher this woman is....She cares more about us getting a deep understanding of the material rather than showing us how many things she knows. To me, that is the mark of an amazing teacher; not just smarts but the ability to relay information effectively."

Meghann Peace
A student nominee for Meghann said that: "Beyond the classroom, she has been a fantastic female role model for going above the call of duty, reaching your career goals, and following your dreams and your talents. She exudes confidence and professionalism while staying kind and non-aggressive, something for which I strive myself." ... "Most importantly, from what I could see in her teaching and the way she talked about Spanish linguistics, I will remember to find something about which to be passionate, and to continue with it as long as I can."

"Topic Marking in L2 Spanish"
Ana Burgers

In the Spanish language classroom, one syntactic characteristic of the language that tends not to be explicitly taught is topic-marking. The topic of a sentence can be defined as "the referent that constitutes the foundation of a mental structure" (Ocampo, forthcoming). Thus sentence topic in oral discourse is the established entity about which the speaker is adding information. While English is a subject-prominent language (the externalized argument of a sentence is the subject), Spanish is a topic-prominent language. Given that research indicates that learner language also tends to be more topic-prominent, this study seeks to identify and analyze strategies and patterns in learner topic marking.
This work describes a case study in which two learners of Spanish completed tasks designed to elicit structures containing a variety of animate and inanimate topics. These tasks centered around two picture stories; learners described each story as a whole and then focused on the role of certain objects therein. The researcher analyzed the structures produced based on the kind of verb they contained and the placement of the topic, as well as whether the topic of the clause coincided with its subject. A qualitative analysis of the results reveals several interesting strategies that the learners used in topic-marking, such as choosing a verb form which allowed the topic to coincide with the subject. Knowing these strategies may be useful in targeting ways to help learners more clearly state their own ideas and better comprehend the ideas expressed by native speakers in Spanish.

Acquiring Variable L2 Spanish Intonation in a Study Abroad Context
John Trimble

Interest in L2 phonology has been growing for some time and has recently produced a number of full length books and edited volumes (e.g., Hanson Edwards & Zampini, 2008; Major, 2001). However, the vast majority of this growing body of experimental and theoretical work has been more concerned with segmental features than suprasegmentals (Major, 2001, p. 17). L2 Spanish phonology has also largely ignored intonation (see Henriksen, Geeslin & Willis, 2010; Nibert, 2005 for notable exceptions).
The current study sets out to research L2 Spanish intonation in a way that systematically addresses some of the major assumptions of L2 phonology. The roles of L1 transfer and stylistic variation are investigated by comparing the declarative and interrogative intonational patterns of learners of Spanish across two stylistically different tasks. Nine English-speaking learners of L2 Spanish completed a formal computerized contextualized reading task and an informal hint giving/question asking interactive game in Spanish and English.
The results revealed differences in the consistency of intonational patterns across the two stylistically different tasks. The informal task facilitated not only considerably more variation than the formal one, but also a higher frequency of L2 target-like intonational patterns. This study supplements the relative scarcity of L2 Spanish intonation research by showing that task style has an important effect on L2 intonation. Furthermore, it confirms that important factors of L2 segmental phonology (L1 transfer, stylistic variation) are also associated with L2 suprasegmental phonology (cf. Díaz-Campos, 2006; Zampini, 1994).

Available for the first time in English, Race in Cuba is a collection of essays that describe the problem of racial inequality in Cuba, provide evidence of its existence, constructively criticize efforts by the Cuban political leadership to end discrimination, and point to a possible way forward. Race in Cuba is the story of Esteban Morales Dominquez, an active participant in the Cuban revolutionary project for the past fifty years and one of Cuba's most prominent Afro-Cuban intellectuals. This work calls for conscious social science research and special policy attention to renovate and advance Cuban socialism as a full participatory democratic project with equitable development for all citizens.

Nimtz will sign copies of his book following the discussion. This event is free and open to the public. For more information, or to order a signed copy visit www.bookstore.umn.edu/genref/authors.html.

More than sixty recipients of prestigious doctoral fellowships will present their research in a casual and conversational environment. These are truly our best and brightest. You'll have the chance to interact with them one-on-one and learn about how their work is creating economic growth throughout the state and advancing human health and well-being throughout the world.

Presentations will encompass a wide-range of topics and disciplines, from community reconstruction in a war-torn country to star-forming regions in spiral galaxies; from the production of renewable fuels to occupational productivity during a recession; from methods to reduce flu virus transmission in pigs to methods of musical paraphrase.

Providing a forum for interdiscursive theoretical discussions and dialogue, the XVIII The State of Iberoamerican Studies Series: Human Rights Across the Disciplines, at the University of Minnesota Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, supports a number of critical symposia that bring together not only the monologues of traditional scholarly disciplines, but also the powerful, struggling and often unarticulated voices, postures and assumptions of contemporary non-canonical cultural discourses. Organized by Luis A. Ramos-García, Nelsy Echávez-Solano, and Alberto Justiniano in collaboration with the College of St. Benedict / St. John's University; Minnesota's Teatro del Pueblo; Imagine Fund Special Events; the Voice to Vision project, and other academic and community organizations; this symposium on Human Rights as well as Art and Theater Festival will take place from February to April at the University of Minnesota Spanish and Portuguese Studies, Department of Art, University International Center, Rarig Center; the College of St. Benedict / St. John's University; and Ritz Theater Auditorium.

Sponsored by an Imagine Fund Special Events grant; the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies; Institute for Global Studies; Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change; Global Programs and Strategic Alliance; Department of French and Italian; U of M Department of Art: Voice to Vision project; Teatro del Pueblo; Pangea World Theater; Minnesota State Legislature; Minnesota State Arts Board; and College of St. Benedict / St. John's University.

For more information about Michael Arnold's dissertation research, please see the attached Research Statement below:

Michael Arnold - Dissertation Research Statement.pdf

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HIOL: Hispanic Issues On Line

An open-access, refereed scholarly electronic publication devoted to the study of Hispanic and Lusophone cultures. The journal aims to be an international forum for the analysis of current issues in our disciplines as well as a venue for new research.

HIOL also publishes Debates, dedicated to the open exchange of ideas related to issues discussed within the Hispanic Issues Series and the HIOL electronic journal. Hispanic Issues and Hispanic Issues On Line are indexed by MLA Bibliography, Dialnet, and other academic databases. The LOCKSS system preserves HIOL at worldwide research libraries. ISSN 1931-8006.

Utterance Final Intonational Variation Across Speech Type in Chilean Broad Focus Declaratives

Brandon Rogers

In recent years a growing amount of attention and research has focused on various aspects of the intonation of the Spanish language. Despite this growing amount of attention, a relatively small amount of attention has been given to Chilean Spanish. The studies that have been done on the Chilean variety have either been done in controlled laboratory settings, or with less controlled speech on more marked utterances such as interrogatives, vocatives, commands, and requests. One study, Ortiz, Fuentes, Astruc (2010) takes a brief look at more controlled broad focus declaratives, but does so with relatively controlled speech and focuses the majority of its attention on more narrow focus utterances and interrogatives. As a result, with respect to Chilean intonation, more is assumed than is known about what is considered to be the most basic of utterances: broad focus declaratives.

The current study examined and compared global and local intonational patterns across three different speech types. Six native Chileans were recorded doing three speech tasks that that varied from controlled and formal to more spontaneous. Additionally, spontaneous data from four more native Chileans was gathered from the Sociolinguistic Corpus of Spoken Chilean Spanish, or COSACH, in order to better study a specific pattern that continued to manifest itself in the data. Results showed several types of variation across the different speech types. The current study focuses on a previously undocumented tendency that was observed in its majority in the utterance final portion of the intonational contours examined.

Developing a second dialect during a semester abroad: Heritage language learners

Angela George and Anne Hoffman-González

Research has shown how dialect in a first language emerges (Siegal, 2010), but less is known about how dialect in a second language develops. Learners of Spanish have adopted more target-like dialectal features after study abroad (Geeslin, 2011; Salgado-Robles, 2011). The current study examines how heritage speakers of Mexican descent with varying degrees of Spanish/English bilingualism develop dialectal features during a semester abroad and how their identity affects this development.

The participants were four advanced U.S. university students, studying in Argentina and Central Spain. A variety of tasks elicited salient phonological dialectal features. In addition, interviews and questionnaires ascertained information regarding identity and attitudes toward the target dialects. The results varied depending on the learner, and to an extent the proficiency level. Of the two in Spain, one adopted dialectal features to identify more with the local dialect and its speakers and one did not adopt any dialectal features, claiming her Mexican heritage. In Argentina both learners adopted local dialectal features. One adopted a specific phonological feature, citing interest in fitting in both in Argentina and a in larger Latino community, while the other struggled more with the dichotomy between fitting in and preserving her Mexican heritage.

These mainly qualitative results have implications for heritage learners planning to study abroad. It shows that the extent to which learners identify with their heritage along with their proficiency level affects whether or not their first dialect of Spanish changes after being immersed in an additional dialect during a semester abroad.

Workshop Information

The Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Conference (UIC) planning committee will be holding a series of workshops to guide you, the student, through the process of proposing and presenting a conference paper. First, on Thursday, February 7, 2013, faculty and staff from the departments of Spanish and Portuguese and Global Studies will hold two workshops on Writing an Effective Abstract. Then on Wednesday, March 13, 2013, after abstracts have been reviewed and conference presenters have been selected, there will be a second set of workshops: What Makes an Effective Conference Presentation? Both workshops will provide time for students to get individual feedback on work in progress from their peers and from members of the UIC planning committee and review board, so please bring drafts. See below for more information on each set of workshops.

Writing an Effective Abstract:
When: 2-3:30 and again from 3:30-5, Thursday, February 7, 2013
Where: 113 Folwell Hall
Who: Students interested in submitting abstracts for the UIC conference
What: In this workshop, faculty and staff from the departments of Spanish and Portuguese and Global Studies will guide you through the process of writing an effective conference abstract. How do you summarize your complex ideas concisely and succinctly? How do you convince your readers of the importance of your paper? How do you sell your work to an interdisciplinary audience? And, um, what the heck is an abstract, anyway...

What Makes an Effective Conference Presentation:
When: 2-3:30 and again from 3:30-5, Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Where: 113 Folwell Hall
Who: Students accepted to present at the UIC conference
What: In this workshop, faculty and staff from the departments of Spanish and Portuguese and Global Studies will give you tips and go over best practices for creating successful conference presentations. How do you strike a balance between an academic and conversational tone (and should you even try)? How do you use visual aids and media to enhance your presentation without distracting from your argument? What types of questions and discussion should you expect after your panel?

Abstracts:

Spanish-language Print Media in the United States: A Critical Multimodal Social Semiotic Analysis of Ideological Representations

by Megan Strom

In light of the 50.5 million people of Hispanic or Latino origin residing in the United States as of 2010 (Ennis, Ríos-Vargas and Albert, 2011, p. 2), it is no surprise that there has been a recent surge of Spanish-language media directed at this population. Although substantial work has been carried out on the linguistic features of Spanish spoken in the United States, almost nothing is known about the semiotic characteristics of Spanish-language media in this country.

Here I present a critical multimodal social semiotic analysis of ideological representations in Spanish-language print media in the Midwest of the United States. The goal of this research is to shed light on how ideologies are visually expressed in Spanish as a minoritized language, as well as the potential for these ideologies to challenge mainstream ideologies. The data include 15 photographs and images that accompanied local news articles from two local Spanish-language newspapers - La Prensa/Gente de Minnesota and La Conexión Latina - from which several semiotic structures were chosen for analysis.

Results indicate that although local Spanish-language newspapers at times visually represent Latino immigrants as victims of maltreatment by the majority group, they overwhelmingly favor representations of Latino immigrants as agentive social actors who stand up to injustices committed against them. As such, the visual mode in these newspapers challenges the negative representations of Latinos found in the United States mainstream media.

Descriptive and acoustic account of Salvadoran interdental realization of /s/

by Ana Cecilia Iraheta

It is well known that /s/ is one of the most variable and studied phonemes in Spanish and that it is strongly manifested as weakening in the form of aspiration [h] and deletion [Ø] in syllable-final position. Though this variation has been extensively studied, /s/ variation studies about Salvadoran Spanish in general are scarce and they have been a minimal part of descriptive phonetic, morphological, and syntactic accounts of the whole dialect (Canfield 1960, Geofroy Rivas 1975, 1978, Lipski 1984, 1985, 1986, 1988, 2000, 2007, Quesada Pacheco 2010). Accounts of /s/ realizations in this dialect have reported phonetic characteristics of not only [s], [h], and [Ø] but also of an interdental-like allophone [θ] which even though is not correlated in any way with the /s/ and /θ/ differentiation in part of Spain, here it will be called interdentalization of /s/

Most of the studies on this dialect have identified the interdental realization of /s/, yet neither a systematic pattern of its occurrence nor an explanation as to the linguistic nature of this type of realization has been reported. The present paper provides a descriptive and acoustic analysis of the linguistic variables that favor the interdental realization of /s/ in Salvadoran Spanish. The variables included were word position, syllable position as well preceding and following segment which included stress/unstressed vowel, vowel height, frontness and backness, voiced/voiceless consonant, and pause. Samples for this paper were taken from existing semi-structured audio recorded interviews collected in the summer of 2010 by the researcher. A total of eight adult speakers of Salvadoran Spanish were included in the sample. The data was statistically analyzed using a multivariate analysis in order to measure the contribution of several factors simultaneously. Then, /s/ as interdental was analyzed using speech analysis software in order to provide an acoustic description of this allophone when it occurred in the presence of the variables that favored it the most. In turn, the results served as basis to provide an account of the relationships at play in the realization of /s/ as interdental in Salvadoran Spanish.

Preliminary results show that syllable initial position favors the interdental when the following segment is an unstressed mid vowel (p<0.001) as in:

(1)...ɑ 'βeθeh... θe 'βa de un pa'ih a otro... (...sometimes when she/he leaves to another country)

(2)... 'eθoh 'kaθoh... (...those cases)

To know the patterns of realization of this allophone aids in the characterization of /s/ variation and its behavior in this understudied dialect. Consequently, this study contributes to understand linguistic elements involved in the interdentalization of /s/ in addition to improve our understanding of the Spanish spoken by immigrant communities in the United States.

"Germany introduces forceful measures against the Hebrews.
A clear warning to international Jewry never again to make attempts on the lives of Germans." - Ideal, Granada, November 13, 1938.

Professor Baer will talk about the contrasting treatment given to the news of the German anti-Jewish pogroms on November 9 & 10, 1938 by the Francoist and Republican sides during the Spanish Civil War.

The Francoist press met the news with approval and glee, in contrast to the condemnations expressed in the Republican papers, which offered solidarity and support to the victims, even as the legitimate Spanish government approached it's own death agony.

The Spanish republicans soon recognized that their fate was intertwined with that of European Jews.

Professor Baer is the new director and Stephen C. Feinstein Chair of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He is a distinguished scholar of Holocaust memory and testimony, and comes to Minnesota after serving on the sociology faculty of the Ludwig Maximilians-Universität-München in Germany.

His books include Holocausto. Recuerdo y representación (Holocaust: Remembrance and Representation) and El testimonio audiovisual. Imagen y memoria del Holocausto (Audiovisual Testimony. Image and Memory of the Holocaust). In addition he has authored numerous articles addressing issues of genocide, memory, and Anti-Semitism. He is currently engaged in research focusing on the uses and abuses of Holocaust history and memory in the Spanish-speaking world as well as the trans-nationalization of memory.

Sponsored by: Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies,Department of History, European Studies Consortium, Institute for Global Studies and the Department of Spanish & Portuguese.

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SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE RESEARCH GROUP
October 12th ‐ Folwell 317 ‐ 3:00 ‐5:00 pm
Marisol Soto-Rodriguez and Nicholas Parmley will be presenting their interesting topics and research for us.

Marisol Soto
"Discurso Neo-barroco en la Escritura Borgeana"

Nicholas Parmley
"Calming the Sea: Marian Maritime Miracles and the Boundaries
of an Imagined Alfonsine Empire in the Cantigas de Santa Maria"

Learn more by clicking on our event flier:
sprg meeting.pdf

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Please join us in Folwell 113 on Wed. Oct 10 at 2:30pm for the first HALLA meeting of the semester, and enjoy the following two presentations:

Acquisition of stress by second language learners of Spanish
Christina Mirisis

The present study examines the relationship between Spanish stress production and perception as it pertains to second language learners' ability to identify the stressed syllable within a series of words that have the same segmental makeup. It is widely known that Spanish stress is contrastive; that is, it distinguishes the meaning between two or more segmentally identical words. For example, término, termino and terminó share the same segments, but are crucially differentiated by the location of stress within each word. Despite this well-known fact of Spanish stress, previous studies have not investigated second language learners' accuracy in producing and perceiving stress within this context in which a change in stress placement concomitantly changes a word's meaning. The present study investigates whether second language learners of Spanish at three different proficiency levels in a university curriculum (beginning, intermediate and advanced) are aware that stress position can shift within segmentally identical words.

The development of a dialect in one's second language: Evidence from a semester abroad in Toledo Spain
Angela George

This study investigates the development of three dialectal features, salient to Castilian Spanish (the Spanish spoken in North-central Spain). During a 13-week semester abroad in Central Spain, the participants, all undergraduate majors or minors of Spanish, completed four tasks at the beginning, middle, and end of the semester. The three tasks--reading a word list, reading a passage, and conversing with a native speaker from Central Spain--were designed to elicit carefully monitored speech as well as spontaneous speech in order to measure the production of the two phonological features-[θ] and [χ]. The fourth task, a Discourse Completion Test, was designed to elicit vosotros. Use of [θ] remained about the same throughout the semester, but [χ] and vosotros increased significantly from the beginning to the middle of the semester and then remained the same at the end of the semester. This presentation will discuss the development of each feature, in terms of social factors such as attitude toward Castilian Spanish.

Please save the date for the next two HALLA meetings which will be Nov 7 and Dec 5 (Wed., 2:30pm in Folwell 113).

For more than twenty years, researchers have been documenting the experiences of people who move from one country to another and build transnational links. Despite this being a particularly frequent phenomenon between Mexico and the United States (Smith 2006; Stephen 2007; Cornelius et al 2009), relatively little has been published about the linguistic and educational experiences of transnational youth - those raised in the U.S. whose families have returned to Mexico and who find themselves integrating into Mexican schools. This integration is fraught with bureaucratic, cultural, and linguistic challenges (Zúñiga et al 2008), yet the numbers of Mexicans returning to Mexico (with their U.S.-raised children) is increasing to the point that, between 2005 and 2010, the 1.4 million Mexicans that returned to Mexico equaled the 1.4 million who went to the U.S. (Pew Hispanic Center 2012). Oaxaca, as the fourth largest sending state after Guanajuato, Michoacán, and Chiapas (Encuesta de Migración en la Frontera Norte de México, 2009), is a particularly interesting context for examining issues related to transnational youth.

In this presentation, Dr. Potowski will offer a preliminary analyses of interviews carried out in both Spanish and English with 20 transnational students currently living in Oaxaca de Juárez, focusing on their classroom and social experiences. Initial observations will also be offered about their Spanish and English proficiency, as well as how their linguistic proficiency in both languages relates to their sense of identity as transnational subjects.

Presenter: Kim Potowski is Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics at The University of Illinois at Chicago, where she directs the Spanish for Heritage Speakers program. She is the executive editor of the journal Spanish in Context and co-editor of the Heritage Language Journal. She spent the 2011-2012 academic year in Oaxaca, Mexico as a Fulbright Scholar conducting research on "transnational" youth. She is currently completing two books about Spanish in Chicago spoken by Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and "Mexi-Ricans."

This is presentation is sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies. Cosponsors include CARLA, the Department of Chicano Studies, the Immigration Research History Center, and the Second Languages and Cultures Education program in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction.

Presenter: Abby Bajuniemi
Influence of interlocutor on Spanish L2 performance

In many second language/foreign language classrooms, instructors often seem to prefer the path of least resistance when grouping students for activities by allowing students to select their own conversation and activity partners. There has been discussion within the fields of testing and second language acquisition as to whether this is the best, most beneficial approach for students with regard to their learning. Results from various studies that have measured output in a variety of ways (grammar tests, conversation analysis, writing samples, etc.) have been mixed regarding what types of pairings are most successful and/or most conducive to learning. The current work is a case study of one learner's performance on two oral examinations given in the last semester of the two-year foreign language requirement at a large midwestern university and takes a conversation analytic approach to the analysis of the transcripts of the two interactions. The learner performed better with the interlocutor who was more advanced than she was, but in a post-hoc interview, felt more confident about her performance with the interlocutor who was not only the same proficiency as her, but with whom she felt most comfortable in class.

Presenter: Megan Strom
Initial results of Critical Discourse Analysis from Spanish-language print media in the United States: A critical multimodal social semiotic exploration of ideological representations.

In this presentation, I summarize the findings of a Critical Discourse Analysis based on Teun van Dijk's Socio-Cognitive approach (1998, 2008) and Norman Fairclough's Dialectal-Relational approach (2001) that focus on the discursive expression of ideology. The data represent 24 local news articles from two local Spanish-language newspapers: La Prensa and La Conexión Latina. Following three levels of analysis, I deconstruct each article to demonstrate how grammatical structures, context, cognition, and overarching social structures combine to create unique discursive representations of ideology in a rarely-studied medium.

While surface structures suggest ideologies of Latinos as powerful social actors, an in-depth critical analysis explains how these surface structures obfuscate stereotypical ideologies of Latinos as powerless backgrounded observers of social events. I emphasize from these initial findings that there is much more to Spanish-language newspapers than initially meets the eye, and that there is potential for this medium to challenge traditional ideologies in Minnesota.

Michael Arnold
The Alpha and the Omega of Pony Bravo Imagery: A Case Study in Twenty-First Century Indie Neoflamenco.

This presentation represents an excerpt from my dissertation chapter on indie neoflamenco and neofado hybrid music. The bands that perform in these genres are exclusively composed of musicians who come from musical backgrounds that fall outside the realm of traditional flamenco and fado. Although many of these musicians grew up listening to a mixture of national traditional music and Anglophone rock, punk, pop, etc., all of them began creating and performing music related to the latter before musically engaging their respective national urban folk influences. I examine the use of national historical patrimony by such artists with respect to the musician's position as global postmodern artist, as glocal representative of social transformations occurring within the neighborhood and across the world, and as indie/electronic music practitioner struggling to balance conflicting demands for authenticity within the new hybrid genre while still trying to survive financially in an overly-saturated and poorly- remunerated medium. In this excerpt, I provide an example of the kind of hybrid cultural production created by such artists via a brief analysis of recent work produced by the Seville-based Pony Bravo. I have chosen to highlight Pony Bravo for this presentation due to their status as pioneers in the indie neoflamenco field, as well as for their artistic work which breaks with previously codified forms of sonic representations while rearticulating (both lyrically and visually) an array of national and international signifiers.

Molly Leonard
Relaciones geográficas: painting a distinct colonial cartography

Colonial cartography provides an exceptional avenue for understanding the way colonial subjects envision and relate to highly transformative cultural spaces and politically defined territories. The Relaciones Geográficas (compiled between 1579 and 1585) are a collection of written and visual responses to Spanish questionnaires seeking information about the landscape of New Spain colonies. There are contending theories, however, as to how these resulting pinturas should be used to view and map out the past.

This talk will attempt to distance the discussion from the binary categories of "Spanish" and "indigenous" and move towards a collaborate conceptualization of colonial cartography. In light of Homi Bhaba's theory on the incommensurability of in-between spaces that emerge in certain intercultural exchanges, we can also conceive of the colonial maps of New Spain as products of a distinct colonial "third space" that differs significantly from both "Spanish" and "indigenous" categorization. By analyzing these pinturas of the Relaciones Geográficas as their very own collection of oftentimes contradictory and diverse components we can move beyond the superficial dichotomy of "native" pinturas as humanistic and social and "European" maps as scientific and rational.

Previous Imagine Fund Award Recipients from our Department

2011 Imagine Fun Annual Award Recipients :

• Professor Fernando Arenas for "Between Migration and Citizenship: Cultural Imaginings at the Borderlines of Africa and Europe"
  
• Michelle Hamilton for "Visions and Delights: 15th-Century Jewish Philosophy and the Spanish Literary Tradition"
  
• Associate Professor Luis Ramos-Garcia for "Research on Alternative Colombian Theater: 25 Years of Resistance"

2010 Imagine Fund Annual Award Recipients :

• Associate Professor Ana Forcinito for "Testimonial Writing, Human Rights and Law : Gender and Cultural Politics in the Uruguayan Post-dictatorship"

2009 Imagine Fund Award Recipients :

• Associate Professor Fernando Arenas for "Between Emigration and Citizenship: Cultural Imaginings of the Cape Verdean Diaspora in Portugal"
  
• Professor Carol Klee for "Dialect Contact in Peru: Variation and Change in Contemporary Limeño Spanish"
  
• Luis Ramos-Garcia for "The Independent Peruvian Theater Movement in times of War"

For more information and to see who else in the University received awards you can visit the Imagine Fund website at: http://www.artsandhumanities.umn.edu/ and CLA's Press Release about the Imagine Fund Awards at: http://www1.umn.edu/news/news-releases/2012/UR_CONTENT_371362.html

John Trevathan
"La boca del Prestige: Speech and Silence in the Nunca Máis Movement"

In 2002, the Prestige oil spill and subsequent ecological disaster launched a popular movement known as Nunca Máis, quickly becoming a widespread democratic response to the government's tepid statements about the crisis. Representing over 300 labor, cultural and civil organizations, Nunca Máis united over a quarter million people towards a greater awareness of the fragility of environments and the ongoing threats imposed by a burgeoning system of late capitalism.

In A cuerpo abierto (2008), Manuel Rivas poetically attributes the roots of this movement to the sea itself. His claim suggests that human mobilization involves collaboration between humans and nonhumans. This talk takes its queue from Rivas's observation and explores how the response to this major ecological disaster investigates the prospects of new kinds of space for regional and global identities in Galicia. In order to evaluate the importance of this movement, I examine the flux of speech and silence at work in Rivas's literary "viaje de periodismo indie," which begins to divulge a view of human and nonhuman communities as mutating, open and nonconformist.

Megan Corbin
"The Museum of Memory: Spectral Presences and Metaphoric Re-memberings"

Objects hold a unique place in both testimonio and projects of memory. In testimonial accounts of experiences of captivity, the speaking subject recounts the loss of his or her subjectivity, the carrying out of the perpetrator's project of the reduction of the self to an object without agency. In memory projects, the object rises to the level of symbol, as exemplified by the now iconic image of the scarves worn by the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo and the widespread recognition of the blindfold used in the detention centers of the dictatorships.

This paper will discuss the spectral presence that haunts memory projects that turn past possessions of the disappeared into museum artifacts, drawing from Jacques Derrida's analysis in Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, The Work of Mourning and the New International to argue for a specific testimonial function for the object. To exemplify this value, this paper will turn to a discussion of one particular subset of objects that appear in the group Memoria Abierta's virtual exposition Vestigios - clothing - and, building upon Nelly Richard's discussion of the residual and the clipping, will argue that clothing is an object with a unique memory value that directly evokes the spectrality of the disappeared person, giving testimony to both his/her past presence and continued presence in post-dictatorship society today.

He has published more than twenty books, among them: Bellas Artes, Y Rep hizo los barrios, Postales, Platinum Plus, La grandeza y la CHIQUEZA, Contratapas, Auxilio, vamos a nacer, and Rep para todos. Rep is known for having created nearly sixty popular characters and series, such as El niño azul, Postales, Bellas Artes, Barrios de Buenos Aires, Gaspar, el Revolú y Lukas. He has been publishing in the newspaper Página/12 since the first issue, and in the magazine Veintitrés and Fierro.

Since 2003 he has painted some forty murals in hospitals, book fairs, universities, parks, cultural centers, and museums in Argentina, Spain, Venezuela, Dominican Republic, Cuba, and German, including Mural Treinta (2006), Mural sobre la Transicion española (2008), Desoncierto sinfónico (2008), with Luis Felipe Noé, León Ferrari and Adolfo Nigro, Mural del Bicentenario (2010), and a mural in the Argentine Pavilion at the Frankfurt Book Fair (2010). More recently, following his illustration of a new edition of Don Quijote, with 260 drawings , he painted Murales de Hermanamiento (2011) as a tribute to Miguel de Cervantes when Alcalá de Henares (Spain) and Azul (Argentina) became sister cities.

This event is sponsored by:
The University of Minnesota Imagine Fund, supported by a generous donation from the McKnight Foundation;
The Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies;
The College of Liberal Arts;
The Institute for Global Studies;
the Global Program and Strategy Alliance's Global Spotlight Initiative
and Gustavus Adolphus College
(Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies).
Our Special Thanks to Mark Knierim, Department of Art.

On March 1st, The State of Iberoamerican Studies Series will honor Cuatroblas Theater (Lima-Perú) for its long-time intellectual and artistic association with the Spanish and Portuguese Theater Studies at the University of Minnesota, and for its forty years of work on behalf of Peruvian Collective and Political Theaters. From 9:15 am to 1:30 pm at Folwell Hall 108, an international group of Human Rights scholars and practitioners lead by Samir Yazbek (Sao Paulo-Brasil); Patricio Vallejo Aristizábal (Quito-Ecuador); Isabel Ortega (Spain-Brasil); Carlos Satizabal (Bogotá-Colombia); Beatriz Rizk (USA-Colombia); Eberto García Abreu (La Habana-Cuba); Maria Antonia Calvo (USA-Spain); Ana Forcinito (USA-Argentina); Raúl Marrero (USA-Cuba); and Luis Ramos-Garcia (USA-Perú) will engage in a public forum and round table discussion which will explore the significant role of Human Rights on Latin American political, and collective theatrical discourses. Although the main focus of the symposium will be Human Rights in Argentina, Brasil, Colombia, Spain and Peru, the panels will also discuss popular cultures, Immigration and legal issues across Latin America, Racial prejudice, Displacement of Women in Colombia and Peru as well as the role of postmodern political theater in Argentina and Brasil. Invited by Ana Forcinito, these international scholars will be joined by Miguel A. Repiso (REP), an Argentinian cartoonist who will work on a mural while the symposium takes place at Folwell 108.
StateIberoamericanProgram.pdf

Theatre Festival: Friday 3/2 and Saturday 3/3 at 7:30 pm. at PANGEA THEATER 711 W Lake St Minneapolis, MN 55408-2918
More information: (651) 224-8806

How and why have renowned authors in Spain engaged with their country's medieval and early modern Sephardic past, particularly since the 1992 quincentennial of the Jews' expulsion in 1492? After an overview of Jewish history in modern Spain, this talk explores ways in which contemporary Spanish authors are incorporating ancient Jewish lifestyles and patterns of persecution into their writing.

Stacy Beckwith is Associate Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature at Carleton College. She is also the Director of Carleton's Judaic Studies Program and Chair of the Department of Middle Eastern Languages. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Minnesota in 1997. She focuses on intersections of national historiography and collective memory in contemporary Israeli and Spanish Peninsular literature, particularly in representations of historic Sephardic Jewish characters. Her current book project examines an emergent focus on traumatic memory in contemporary Spanish literature that connects with medieval Jewish Iberian civilization and its aftermath.

The final meeting of the Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics Association (HaLLA) of the Fall 2011 on Friday, December 9. The theme of this meeting is Buenos Aires Spanish and will feature presentations by Phil Thornberry and Anne Hoffman-González.

Tonal crowding is a phenomenon in intonational phonology in which an utterance's stressed syllables appear within quick succession of each other, leaving few, if any, unstressed syllables between them. Past research into Castilian and Mexican Spanish has shown that tonal crowding affects the phonetic realization of key events in the intonational contour. Tonal crowding, though, has not been examined thus far in Buenos Aires Spanish. Due to the distinct intonational structure of porteño Spanish, we may reasonably expect tonal crowding to be resolved in ways not yet reported due to the choice of dialects studied in prior research. This experimental study demonstrates that tonal crowding influences both the scaling and alignment of pitch accents in the porteño intonational contour. Moreover, I present strong evidence that speakers of Buenos Aires Spanish employ unique and previously unreported strategies for resolving the more extreme cases of tonal crowding.

I am currently performing a dissertation-level, qualitative study on dialect acquisition by semester-long study abroad students in Buenos Aires, Argentina. There are many strands that will be incorporated into the final thesis. On Friday I will present on students' initial descriptions of the Buenos Aires dialect and how a recognition task illustrates their perceptions of said dialect. I will contextualize these findings within an overview of the other strands of this project.

This paper aims to provide a new interpretation of Juan González de Mendoza's History of the Great Kingdom of China (1585), the most important Spanish text on China in the 16th-Century. By focusing on the cultural production and practices of the Spanish empire in China, I argue that Spanish imperialism cannot be understood in isolation from other geographical regions, and from the global exchange from which it emerged. In my paper I explore the formation of Spanish empire in the Pacific Rim and their global connections. By adopting an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural comparative approach, my work is an attempt to rethink and revise the concepts of imperialism and colonialism, as we take into account the mutual influences among world regions. It was precisely the Spanish empire that connected and combined the histories of Europe, Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the Caribbean, giving way to the making of a global community in the early modern period.

Presenter: Meghann Peace

Within the field of second language acquisition, little work has been done on the acquisition of Spanish intonation by adult native speakers of English. Nibert (2005) offers as evidence the lack of transparency in the structure and meaning of intonation, and Ladd (2008) notes that the paralinguistic and emotion-based characteristics often associated with intonation cause many to see it as a non-linguistic feature in non-tonal languages such as Spanish.

However, the Autosegmental-Metrical approach, as developed by Pierrehumbert (1980), has paved the way for a number of studies that deal with Spanish intonation as a linguistic and phonological characteristic of the language (e.g., Face, 2002; Hualde, 2003; Nibert, 2000; Sosa, 1999 and Willis, 2003). Although these studies deal with Spanish as a native language, the Autosegmental-Metrical framework used in them can be extended to analyze non-native Spanish as well.

This paper makes use of the Autosegmental-Metrical framework to examine the phonetic characteristics of key intonational events in the speech of non-native adult learners of Spanish. In order to examine the acquisition of dialect-specific intonation and to allow for the direct comparison of non-native Spanish with the native Spanish target intonation, the participants chosen for this study were native English speakers who were involved in romantic relationships with native Spanish speakers. The native English speakers produced Spanish utterances in a laboratory setting, the intonation patterns of which were then compared to their own English utterances and to the same Spanish utterances as produced by their partners.

The results indicate that acquisition of Spanish intonation patterns by native English speakers is possible. Additionally, the native English speakers' motivation to speak in Spanish with their partners is a factor that contributes to the successful acquisition of their partners' dialect-specific intonation patterns.

Presenter: Alicia M.Ocampo

El presente trabajo analiza características sintácticas, semánticas, pragmáticas y discursivas de las dos construcciones transitivas ejemplificadas en el título. La noción de transitividad ha sido considerada prototípica (Taylor 1989; Hopper y Thompson 1980); o sea, que existen construcciones más transitivas que otras. Mi hipótesis propone que, entre ambas construcciones, la transitividad es mayor en las que presentan duplicación del OD, y por esto aparecen destacadas (salient) dentro del contexto. El uso de la construcción con duplicación en la variedad del Río de la Plata está motivado por dos factores: la topicalización del Objeto Directo/Paciente y/o la intencionalidad destacada del Sujeto/Agente. La construcción transitiva es un fenómeno de un complejo juego de significados y puede ser utilizado por el hablante según sus diferentes necesidades comunicativas.

El análisis se basa en un corpus de veinte horas de conversaciones informales grabadas en La Plata, Argentina. Se han incluido emisiones de 26 hablantes de clase media (15 mujeres y 11 varones) entre las edades de 31 y 76 años. En total fueron analizadas 424 construcciones transitivas, de las que 50 presentan duplicación del OD.

"The Trauma of Europeanness in Los soles truncos with Daniel Arbino
What happens when society changes and the protagonist no longer wants to belong? In this presentation I argue that orphans coping with trauma participate in their own alienation and displacement by eschewing societal transformations that directly weaken the colonial class status that they covet: that is, they elect precisely not to belong. Los soles truncos (1958) by René Marqués makes use of traumatized orphans of the decaying bourgeoisie, intent on maintaining their separation from other racial sectors, to criticize what the author perceives to be an oppressive U.S. regime in Puerto Rico through criollo protagonist self-victimization and longing for power. What I postulate is that though these orphans are employed to show opposition to U.S. occupation, they can also be read as favoring an outdated colonial racial hierarchy that alienates them from their changing society. Due to a fear of change that will cause the bourgeoisie to relinquish their privilege, the protagonists are unable to promote racial equality for the largely Afro-Antillean masses. Instead, trauma centers on the subjects of a crumbling plantocracy, creating sympathy for them as victims of history, despite their previous role as aggressors.

"Navigating Transgressive Desire: Maleness, Sexuality, and the Performative in João Pedro Rodrigues' Morrer Como Um Homem with Scott Ehrenburg
João Pedro Rodrigues has been described a mystérieux Portugay director whose work has reached critical acclaim primarily through a "trilogy" of queer films: O Fantasma (2000), Odete (2005), and Morrer Como Um Homem (2009). This paper explores the final film, one in which Rodrigues addresses the complexity of trans-identity by taking the viewer on the journey of a career drag queen, Tonia, who not only performs theatrically on stage but also assumes multiple gendered roles in both public and private realms. Using a Butlerian framework of performativity, it is my contention that in the complexity and richness of these spaces the director deconstructs prefabricated notions of maleness and sexuality through a lens saturated with cinematic elements/structures that problematize gendered notions of subjectivity. In addition, Rodrigues' film acts as a key intervention by challenging our understanding of a camp, queer, and transgressive desire as he re-appropriates traditional symbols, styles, and techniques in a progressive even pioneering way, that demonstrates the need for a continued Queer cinema.

Acknowledging the trend in contemporary Argentine cinema of articulating hybrid documentary fictional films as post-dictatorial memorials, my projects revisits the mixed narratives in the surrealist/ethnographic visual/audiovisual productions by Maya Deren, Horacio Coppola and Grete Stern, as wells as their reverberations in Narcisa Hirsch´s experimental cinema of the 1970´s, the videoart that Graciela Taquini started the 1980´s and the new millennium films by Albertina Carri and Lucrecia Martel. My contribution will be to demonstrate how the appropriation and reformulation of the historical vanguards create a new space to explore post-traumatic narratives dealing with both memory and its counterpart, what remains un-remembered.

HIOL: Hispanic Issues On Line is an open-access, refereed scholarly electronic publication devoted to the study of Hispanic and Lusophone cultures. The journal aims to be an international forum for the analysis of current issues in our disciplines as well as a venue for new research dealing with areas of inquiry such as Literary Criticism, Theory and Historiography, Popular and Mass Culture, Hispanic Cultural Studies, Literature and Institutions, and Hispanic Sociolinguistics.

This will be a workshop on preparing your cover letter and cv. Also--if you are currently applying for jobs and would like to have your cv and/or letter reviewed, please send Professor Hamilton your cv and/or letter via email to her before Friday, October 21st.

Please RSVP to Prof. Hamilton (hamilton@umn.edu)

Also--all faculty are welcome to attend, as advice on the interview process is very welcome.

Carla Manzoni: "Daughters in trance: docu-fictional narratives in Argentine post dictatorial film by young women

Film critics have recognized a trend in the last decade in Argentine cinema of hybridizing documentaries and fictional narratives. Most of the directors choosing this crossbred storytelling format are women revising issues of gender and identity in relation to the 1976-1983 dictatorship.

I echo Joana Page's idea that fiction is created to fill the void of memory or, in her words, " to paper over the gaps of history", believing that these fictionalized moments are not only the richest aspects in the narratives of trauma and memory but they also represent specific aspects of contemporary narratives by women. This connection between gender and the docu-fictional confluence inspires me to revise the works of Maya Deren (1917-1961), pioneer in protofeminist film who explores both as an artist and as an intellectual the topics of cinema by women, ethnographic film and surrealist fictions.

My project recuperates Deren's work to rethink Albertina Carri's films, especially those that portray these"gaps" covered with fiction, such as the use of dolls (Barbie también puede eStar triste y Los Rubios), animations (Los Rubios, La Rabia y Restos) and the interpellation of cinema as a medium that is most evident in Restos.

Satty Flaherty-Echeverria: "Meta-heteronym: Saramago, Reis and Pessoa"

In "O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis" (1984) Jose Saramago goes beyond the idea of heteronym, to forge a sort of meta-heteronym. He uses the character Ricardo Reis (originally created by Fernando Pessoa) to recreate the last year of his life attached to Pessoa's death. In this recreation of Reis, the reader sees Saramago playing with the double identity of the character(s). This paper argues that Saramago appropriates Ricardo Reis to write Pessoa's subconscious character within himself, creating a novel with intertextual characteristics. In doing so, Saramago not only brings Pessoa back to life, but he also makes a parody of Pessoa as his heteronym. This analysis of "O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis" will determine Saramago's use of intertextuality and parody of the different voices narrating the novel. The terms used by Kristeva and Hutcheon, intertextuality and parody respectively, are not in essence different when used by Saramago. As of now, the writings on intertextuality and parody are contraposed and defined as being determined by the reader (in terms of intertextuality) or by the author (as in parody). "O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis" represents the synthesis of both theories, through the fusion of two terms that would otherwise be considered mutually exclusive. By adding the element of intertextuality with ideas linked to parody and the use of heteronym, this fusion fosters an understanding of the novel in terms of a meta-heteronym, which leads to greater questions surrounding Pessoa's creation of heteronomy, national identity, and its historical embedded Portuguese suffering during 1936.

Learn about the Spanish and Portuguese Across Cultures Organization (SPACO) and the various activities that SPACO holds. In the past we have held salsa nights, conversation hours, movie nights, cooking nights, dinner gatherings, volunteer activities and more!

Play games in Spanish such as Scrabble, Catch phrase, Guess Who, etc.

Enjoy pizza and pop.

Presenter: Susana Pérez-Castillejo

Interrogativas absolutas en el castellano de Galicia: Variación por contacto de lenguas

A partir de un corpus de oraciones interrogativas de 24 hablantes, el presente trabajo analiza los efectos suprasegmentales del contacto entre castellano y gallego. Adoptando una metodología sociofonética y el sistema métrico autosegmental, se examinan los tonemas interrogativos en función del contexto pragmático, formalidad de la tarea y la exposición al gallego de cada participante. Los resultados revelan variación estilística, indicativa de la estigmatización de rasgos vernáculos, y un cambio de relaciones prosódico-pragmáticas inducido por el contacto con el gallego.

Presenter: John Trimble

Perceiving intonational cues in a foreign language: Study abroad and its effect on the perception of sentence type in two dialects of Spanish

Despite the growing body of experimental and theoretical work addressing the Spanish intonation system, this emerging field has been relatively slow to carry over to the acquisition of Spanish as a foreign or second language. The current study sets out to build on earlier preliminary studies and address some of the major challenges of investigating L2 Spanish intonation by comparing the perceptual abilities of learners with varying experiences with Spanish to those of native speakers. Three speakers of Spanish were recorded to create a gating experiment. One was from Toledo, Spain; one from Merida, Venezuela; and one a graduate instructor of Spanish, born in the Midwestern United States. These dialects differ greatly in the intonational cues they use to distinguish declaratives and absolute interrogatives. While both dialects mark absolute interrogatives with higher initial peaks, Andean Venezuelan Spanish is characterized by an exaggerated rising-falling "circumflex" pattern, while Castilian uses a simple final rise.

To investigate the effect of these cues on the acquisition of L2 Spanish, 42 university students performed two listening tasks. Both consisted of lexically identical pairs of declaratives and interrogatives that were recorded for all three speakers. In general, learners at all levels had great difficulty perceiving sentence type without the final pitch movement. Additionally, the absolute interrogative pattern of Andean Venezuelan was significantly more difficult than the other patterns (p<.001). In fact, the overall mean accuracy for all learners only reached 52% for these interrogatives. However, an ANCOVA revealed that the six learners that had spent a semester in Merida performed significantly better when listening to the Andean Venezuelan utterances (p=.024). Specifically, these study abroad participants averaged 72% accuracy. This study adds to the relative scarcity of L2 Spanish intonation research, and its results allow for the discussion of both theoretical and pedagogical implications.

This international symposium will address the role that literature, art and film have in the struggles against enforced disappearance, torture, degrading treatment, forced prostitution, human trafficking, violence against immigrants, gender violence, and feminicide. We seek to address the relations between artistic practices and struggles against impunity and between aesthetics and ethics, and to give visibility to current human rights concerns and to the design of practices of memory.

The symposium will gather an international group of guest speakers, in the areas of the humanities, the arts, social sciences, and Law, from the University of Minnesota, and from universities and organizations in the United States, Latin America, Portugal and Spain and it will to explore the relation between the arts and humanities in the struggles against impunity and in the design of practices of memory.

For listing of speakers, times and locations please go to this website: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/mhrconf/ongoing_dialogues%20about%20memory%20and%20human%20rights/

This symposium is free and open to the public.

Denise K. Filios is a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa. Among other works, she is the author of Performing Women in the Middle Ages: Sex, Gender, and the Iberian Lyric. Her teaching and research interests include medieval Spanish literature, women in literature, performance, and North African-Spanish cultural contacts from 711 to the present. She is currently developing a project on depictions of Al-Andalus in North American, Spanish, and North African historiography and literature.

Co-Organized by the IAS Collaborative Mediterranean Identities from the Middle Ages to Today.

This international symposium will address the role that literature, art and film have in the struggles against enforced disappearance, torture, degrading treatment, forced prostitution, human trafficking, violence against immigrants, gender violence, and feminicide. We seek to address the relations between artistic practices and struggles against impunity and between aesthetics and ethics, and to give visibility to current human rights concerns and to the design of practices of memory.

The symposium will gather an international group of guest speakers, in the areas of the humanities, the arts, social sciences, and Law, from the University of Minnesota, and from universities and organizations in the United States, Latin America, Portugal and Spain and it will to explore the relation between the arts and humanities in the struggles against impunity and in the design of practices of memory.

For further information contact Professorf Ana Forcinito (aforcini@umn.edu) or Jaime Hanneken (hanne045@umn.edu).

HR Flyer5.pdf

The present study focuses on a Spanish-language television commercial for Inglés Sin Barreras, a highly popular and highly advertised English-language program. A multimodal social semiotic analysis based on Kress and van Leeuwen's (1996, 2001) social semiotic analysis and Hallidayan (1978, 1985) linguistics is carried out in order to ascertain how ideology and power are expressed in verbal and visual modes of communication.

The commercial functions within an overarching ideology of barriers, where the physical barriers that separate Latin America from the United States are extended to include linguistic, social, and economic barriers that separate Latino immigrants from the United States. The visual analysis reveals a strong affinity between the commercial's announcer and the viewer, rendering the crossing of barriers possible. Social proximity is visually realized through direct gaze, medium and close shots, and frontal and eye-level camera angles. However, the verbal analysis establishes barriers between the announcer and the viewer through ideologically contested vocabulary and pronouns, resulting in the divergence of meaning across modes that is indicative of traditional advertising patterns. The present contribution underscores the need for further study of Spanish-language texts using the multimodal social semiotics approach.

Vanessa Paloma specializes in the oral traditions of Northern Morocco's Jewish community. Her work focuses on issues of identity transmission through women's songs in Moroccan Judeo‐Spanish.

She performs internationally and is active in academic conferences around the world. Paloma is a current Research Associate of the Hadassah Brandeis Institute and a former Senior Fulbright Research Scholar to Morocco.

A light lunch will be served.

Sponsored by: Jewish Studies, Sabes Jewish Community Center, Spanish & Portuguese Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Music

You can view several of her works on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTC-oV0CLb0
or
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mM1qeR-NV30

Presenter: Phil Thornberry
Grammaticalization is a phenomenon of linguistic evolution wherein concrete, lexical items develop abstract grammatical meanings. Moreover, many studies claim that the principle of unidirectionality prohibits the opposite development of concrete concepts from abstract sources. To the contrary, I show in this paper that the lunfardo of the Río de la Plata region of Argentina is enriched by a process of lexicalization in which concrete references are generated from abstract sources, thus placing in question the traditionally assumed "universals" of grammaticalization.

Presenter: Meghann Peace
"El que no sabe, es como el que no ve"
La gramaticalización de visto que
La acción de ver y el concepto de la causalidad aparecen varias veces en el World Lexicon of Grammaticalization (Heine y Kuteva 2002). Ver se usa en unas lenguas mundiales como una fuente de la gramaticalización, mientras que causa es con frecuencia el objetivo de algunos caminos de la gramaticalización. Sin embargo, no se establece en el libro una conexión entre los dos conceptos.

La meta de este trabajo es proveer datos y ejemplos españoles que muestran que el camino ver > causa es uno que debe incluirse en los compendios de la gramaticalización. El análisis se basa en datos obtenidos de los últimos nueve siglos con respecto a la frase española visto que (Davies 2002) y parte de la orientación teórica presentada por Kurylowicz (1975), Heine, Claudi y Hünnemeyer (1991), Heine y Kuteva (2002), Lessau (1994) y Brinton y Traugott (2005).

This presentation deals with the interaction between memory formation and performance in Mexico during two periods of commemorative events. Mexico's 1910 Centennial celebrations of independence from Spain created a popular stage for citizens to re-enact their own history. This process of reflecting on the past created a new series of conflicts and tensions that contributed to the outbreak of revolutionary violence in 1910. One hundred years later, Mexico celebrated its bicentennial of independence from Spain amidst a political context marked once again by violence and social division.

The presentation will highlight key differences and similarities between 1910 and 2010.

Os recuerdo que este LUNES 6 DE DICIEMBRE a las 4 de la tarde tendrá lugar la conferencia: "La Constitución Española: Transición Modélica, Consolidación Pendiente" organizada por el Departamento de Español y Portugués de la Universidad de Minnesota, con motivo de la celebración del Día de la Constitución Española.

El conferenciante será D. Manuel Pastor, catedrático de Ciencia Política de la Universidad Complutense. La conferencia es gratuita, en castellano y tendrá lugar en la sala 125 del Nolte Center de la Universidad. Los asistentes a la conferencia recibirán una copia de la Constitución Española, cortesía de la Embajada de España en Washington.

Link to a short Biography of Professor Manuel Pastor Manuel Pastor-1.doc

Wood, Naomi. "Ciphering Nations: Hip Hop Culture and Transnational Dialogue"

This paper is an introduction to the concept "ciphering nations" that I use in my dissertation as a theoretical frame. I conceive of Hip Hop Culture as a valuable place for reconceiving performances of national identity in postcolonial and Afro-diasporic contexts. This talk will focus on Brazil as a case and will discuss famous feminist film stars, figures, and protagonists as their performances move beyond the discourse of Freyrian "racial harmony" and insert gender as a spectacularized, powerful, and slippery position from which to reify Nation.

Ostrom, Katherine. "'O homem é forte': The Excess of Masculine Violence in Patrícia Melo's *O matador*."

Patrícia Melo is a woman that writes crime fiction, a genre heavily dominated by men and, in her native Brazil, dominated by a single writer, Rubem Fonseca. Although women are often accused of being too soft to write about murder and Melo risks being seen as a minor imitator of Fonseca, she plays with her reputation in various ways, including, in the novel *O matador*, borrowing a character and major elements of her plot from a short story by Fonseca. By writing explicit violence from the point of view of a rapist and murderer, Melo shows that she is plenty tough enough to beat the boys at their own game, paying homage to her mentor while simultaneously exposing the misogyny that goes unacknowledged in his work.

SEE YOU THERE!
Nico Parmley and Isabel de Sousa Ramos (Co-Chairs SPRG)

The Department of French and Italian announces a lecture by Jamie Hanneken from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese entitled, "Francophone Studies, Latin Americanism and Identity Thinking"

Why does identity continue to be such a problem for postcolonial studies, despite the fact that institutional postcolonialism is itself built upon the critique of identity? Comparative studies in principle offer a model of inquiry resistant to the disciplinary and theoretical appropriations that tend to trammel the postcolonial into a given set of experiences, discourses, or political positionalities. The theoretical approaches most attentive to the problem of identity made available to this kind of work continue to center on the potential of a "double" theoretical practice that allows scholarship to construct its object both empirically and conjecturally as an "altered citation" (Gayatri Spivak), a "savage hybridity" (Homi Bhabha, Alberto Moreiras), or an "untranslatable" (Emily Apter). Through a comparative review of the ways the threat of identity--disciplinary, commercial, political, and cultural--structures Latin Americanist and Francophone engagements with postcolonialism, this study evaluates the premises of these approaches in tension with Theodor Adorno's negative dialectics. Bringing his reflections on identity thinking to bear on their deconstructive idiom, comparative work may better attempt to think through the concept of the postcolonial and its entanglement with the object.

Light refreshments will be served.

Music production and consumption in colonial Lourenço Marques among Africans particularly in the 1960s and 1970s was very complex with many actors involved pursuing different and often contradictory goals. Local Africans began to break the chains of cultural oppression in the late 1950s and 60s inspired by Negritude, Panafricanism, and nationalist movements, while at the same time seeking to define their cultural practices in their own terms. In the process, cultural institutions or associations such as Associação Africana (AA) and Centro Associativo dos Negros de Moçambique (CANM) and the student organization NESAM had to overcome their own limitations and biases against their traditions that colonialism had made them believe were backward and primitive. They had to (re)-learn to embrace their cultural heritage particularly food, dance, and music, which they had learned to despise in an effort to become assimilados or "civilized."In this presentation, I will examine some of the most influential cultural associations and institutions, and musicians that played a significant role in the country between 1960s and 1970s, and how they shaped local musical tastes. I will show that African musicians such as Daíco were cultural mediators between the world of Africans and whites while at the same time they helped break the racial barriers that relegated Mozambican music to marginal roles. They made possible for marrabenta to become acceptable in the most sophisticated ballrooms frequented primarily by whites. Drawing on a wide range of sources, I reconstitute the biographical careers of Daíco and Fanny Mpfumo to show how they shifted from foreign music appropriations to shape Mozambican identity through music, while challenging Portuguese colonial system.

The International Society for Luso-Hispanic Humor Studies (ISLH/HS) promotes the study and appreciation of humor wherever Spanish and Portuguese are spoken. The society encourages all areas of humor scholarship in the Luso-Brazilian and Hispanic worlds. It is dedicated to dissemination of information to a diverse population and encourages communication with others interested in this expanding field.

The event will address the new challenges that Luso-Hispanic Linguistics and Literature are facing, in particular with regards to the crossing of disciplinary borders such as in Cultural Studies and in the integration of Linguistics and Literature. We initiated this discussion in the pages of the first volume of Hispanic Issues On Line. We plan to continue this discussion by editing a volume with selected papers presented at the XII Annual Conference.

Conference Webpage: http://gustavus.edu/mlc/ISLHHS/ISLHHS/Home.html

Cost: Pre-registration: $80, or $40 student with ID, on site: $100, or $50 student with ID

Towle's work as a human rights observer in Zapatista communities offers a unique perspective to understand the current state of the revolution as it responds to on-going human rights abuses and modern economic and political pressures in Mexico.

Towle received a bachelor's degree in Spanish and international studies from North Dakota State University and a master's degree in Hispanic literature from the University of Minnesota.

The mission of the Latino/Latin American Studies Program at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University is to promote greater awareness and understanding of Latino and Latin American history and culture among the CSB, SJU and local communities.

"Teacher L1 use in the Spanish Foreign Language classroom: A qualitative study" by Angela George

This study examined the use of the teacher's first language, L1, in the Spanish foreign language 2nd semester university classroom. Only recently the use of L1 in foreign language teaching has become considered more appropriate (Song & Andrews 2009). Optimal L1 use in the communicative language classroom facilitates target language acquisition by the learner because the L1 is used as a "cognitive and meta-cognitive tool, as a strategic organizer, and as a scaffold for language development" (Turnbull & Dailey-O'Cain 2009: 183). The teacher in this case strived for such optimal use. In this study I tried to answer the following research questions: How do the teacher's beliefs about her L1 use match her actual classroom practices and how does the teacher incorporate the L1 into her classroom discourse?

"Effect of segmental token frequency on final /d/ in North-Central Peninsular Spanish" by Susana Perez

In North-Central Peninsular Spanish syllable-final /d/ often presents a voiceless fricative allophone [θ]. Theoretical explanations of this phenomenon fail to motivate the strengthening of the coda - a generally weak position in Spanish - that occurs when a fricative allophone appears in lieu of an expected approximant. Experimental studies have related frication to the airflow increase in stressed syllables, and explained devoicing as a consequence of the longer duration of the coda segment before a pause. Still, the co-occurrence of frication and devoicing in utterance-medial position, sometimes before a voiced consonant, is unaccounted for. This paper assumes a usage-based model of phonology and shows that the frequency of use of /d/ in a phonetic environment that favors a voiceless fricative articulation has an effect on the extension of this pattern to other phonetic contexts.

This study contributes to the increasing body of research that shows that the frequency of use of a phonetic pattern is among the factors that affect production. Thus, results provide evidence for the validity of a usage-based model of phonology. By applying this model, the present analysis achieves a better understanding of why the /d/ > [θ] __# pattern extends to contexts in which it cannot be explained as the interaction of phonological constraints or as an effect of the phonetic environment alone.

Isabel de Sousa Ramos: 'Ocultos de nós mesmos': A exclusão dos (i)migrantes em O Meu Nome é LegiãoEm O Meu Nome é Legião (2007), António Lobo Antunes dramatiza a exclusão e incriminação experienciada pelos imigrantes em Portugal, deixando entrever a discriminação vivenciada pelos imigrantes das ex-colónias africanas e, em particular, seus descendentes. Pode-se argumentar que o romance, de facto, demonstra como essa discriminação é fruto de estereótipos e preconceitos, que permeiam o pensamento português e europeu característico de nações ex-coloniais.

O propósito da presente comunicação é analisar a representação de tais preconceitos e estereótipos a partir de uma abordagem interdisciplinar e tendo especificamente em conta a investigação que tem sido levada a cabo por cientistas sociais relativamente aos chamados novos racismos em Portugal. Assim, pretendo pôr em evidência como o romance de Lobo Antunes dá conta de fenómenos tais como a "etnicização da criminalidade"; "racismo-nacionalismo fundido"; violência institucional; segregação habitacional; marginalização; dessensibilização e suplício físico-psicológico; confusão identitária; "stress aculturativo" e interiorização da discriminação.

John Trevathan: Decapitated automatic woman: surrealist gestures and woman´s agency

Focusing on surrealism as a mediating lens for a unique female gaze, my paper explores the film "The Headless Woman" (2008) by Argentinean director Lucrecia Martel. I am particularly interested in how the director's non-traditional story telling emulates an "unconscious" sphere within the film. Inspired by Breton's image of "écriture automatique" portrayed as a woman and Luce Irigaray's interrogation about "whether the feminine has unconscious or whether it is the unconscious", this "para-space" where meaning takes place is undoubtedly characterized with woman´s attributes.

I am concentrating on Surrealism as a force for deconstructing discourses and for materializing a new space of "resistance to hegemonic cultural formations as well as the psychic contagion as a sign of collective imaginary" as Natalia Lusty insists. Moreover, it also creates a highly emotional (new) reality, contrary to tradition and the laws for logic, causality and syntax. These two aspects are extremely valuable for interpreting Martel's "The Headless Woman". Throughout the film the director deliberately disarticulates the narration to achieve this non-hegemonic "para-space", that my research in interested in. She accomplishes this by dissecting the story into multiple storylines and by selecting specific filming techniques such as CinemaScope, crisp framing, selective focus and non-traditional takes.

In Freudian as well as in Foucaultian terms, the idea of "the unconscious" as an alternative gaze engages with multiple lines of academic study and stimulates not only a revision of surrealist esthetic as critique of pure reason, but also its relationship with memory and trauma theories.

Carla Manzoni: Loving with Hatred: Violence and Utilization of North African Space in Nedjma and Count Julián

This project explores the ambivalence of the North African cultural space as manifest in Kateb Yacine's Nedjma and Juan Goytisolo's Reivindicación del Conde don Julían, focusing on different manifestations of structural and textual violence exhibited in each text. If we are to think of the novel as a possible vehicle for socio-linguistic development and awareness, then the employment of violence in the parodic novel functions as a catalyst, asserting something different from its predecessors. In the case of Goytisolo and Kateb, the various phenomena of violence mark attempts to expose and open up language to the heterogeneous processes of nation-state building.

Count Julian is the second novel in the Álvaro Mendiola trilogy. The text is best described as predominantly discursive, designed to obsessively engage and terrorize the Spanish literary tradition and scholarship, as well as utilize the bitter relationship between Spanish culture and the Moroccan city of Tangiers: as a problematic synecdoche for North Africa, Spain's cultural other. Kateb's decision to write an Algerian novel in French instead of Arabic or Berber already signifies a confrontation between a European textual space and an Algerian geographical space. The act of writing a novel allows Kateb to engage the North African space from a European form.

Both novelists are insiders, posing culturally or linguistically as outsiders. Importantly, both of these authors cannot avoid this subject of homeland. There is an inextricable link between the text [novel] and homeland, which I will call a relation of love. While this term obviously does not suggest that either author "likes" or "enjoys" being Spanish or Algerian, it certainly posits an imperative to critically write about their environs. Indeed, contrarily (and parodically), this attachment manifests itself in forms of violence. To use the Lacanian term, the logic of hainamoration prevails as the mode of ambivalence: loving with hatred.

Este trabajo se enfoca en las estrategias de apertura conversacional utilizadas por vendedores y clientes en el ámbito de la venta ambulante en Bogotá, Colombia. En primer lugar se hace una identificación del desarrollo secuencial de dichas estrategias. Seguidamente se establece una comparación entre los patrones encontrados y aquéllos descritos por Anderson (1998) y Trihn (2002), entre otros. En tercer y último lugar, se determina si la fase de apertura de la venta exhibe una inclinación hacia la cortesía de solidaridad o cortesía deferencial siguiendo la agrupación que de los tipos de cortesía (Brown & Levinson, 1987) hacen Scollon & Scollon (1983).

Las estrategias de apertura en este ambiente informal de prestación de servicios son de particular interés debido a las diferencias sociales y de poder que generalmente se atribuyen a sus interlocutores: los vendedores ambulantes y sus clientes. No obstante, la identidad social, en vez de reflejar dichas diferencias en el discurso, parece ser recreada por el mismo.

Los resultados de este estudio contribuyen al casi inexplorado campo del análisis de la conversación y la pragmática en ambientes callejeros de venta y además permitirán establecer comparaciones con otros estudios en diferentes latitudes o contextos.

Prior research has found that certain dialects of English are significantly more difficult to understand than others for adult learners of English as a second language (Eisenstein & Verdi, 1985; Major et al., 2005). Spanish represents an interesting new area for this type of research because of its well documented variation across dialects (e.g. Lipski, 1994). The current study investigates the relationship between phonological variation across dialects and the intelligibility of these dialects for learners of Spanish as a second language. Five dialects of Spanish were chosen with special attention to phonological variation (Rioplatense, Caribbean, Bogotano, Mexican and Castilian). The Spanish of bilinguals dominant in English was also included. To determine the intelligibility scores, two levels of university Spanish students listened to 24 short speech samples. The 6 dialects were significantly different in terms of their intelligibility scores for both levels of learners (p <.001). Certain learner variables also correlated with increased intelligibility scores. These findings allowed for the discussion of several pedagogical implications.

The Edict of Expulsion by the Spanish monarchs in 1492 ended over a millennium of co-existence between Jews and Christians on the Iberian peninsula. In 1487-88, the Inquisition falsely accused a group of Jewish and New Christian neighbors near Toledo of committing ritual murder on a Christian child. The sensational trial was instrumental in the royal decision to expel the Jews. Trial documents reveal the complex daily interaction of Christians and Jews under the Inquisition--and how the Inquisition read that coexistence as a threat to the nation's integrity and security. *SPECIAL PERFORMANCE: Musical selections by the Voices of Sepharad.

Non-native articulations of vowels have been shown to contribute to a foreign accent. Second language (L2) learners of Spanish at beginning, intermediate, and advanced stages of acquisition have been found to retain a mark of their English accent in their Spanish vowel productions, yet these few studies have only considered learners who began studying the language as adults; none have investigated Spanish vowel acquisition by child learners with early, extended exposure to Spanish. Given that previous work has suggested L2 study during childhood leads to greater accuracy in the articulation of L2 sounds, this is an important population to consider in order to further our understanding of how Spanish vowels are acquired by L2 learners. This study sets out to address this gap by investigating the development of immersion learners' pronunciation of Spanish vowels, comparing the productions of native English-speaking learners to those of Spanish-English bilingual peers. The effect of type of immersion program will be explored as will development over (apparent) time.

Presenter: Mandy R. Menke is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Linguistics in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies. Her research encompasses the fields of second language acquisition, phonology, and immersion education. She has taught Spanish at the University of Minnesota and was an immersion teacher in Virginia for three years. She has served as one of the instructors for the Immersion 101 summer institute and has been working with Tara Fortune on a publication looking at struggling learners in the immersion classroom. She was selected as the CARLA Fellow for the 2008-2009 year.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies.

Raúl Marrero-Fente, Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies
"Global Hispanic and Lusophone Studies and the Future of the Discipline"
My talk aims to provide a new interpretation of the genealogies of imperialism and colonialism in the Global Hispanic and Lusophone Worlds during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By focusing on the cultural production and practices of Portuguese and Spanish empires in Africa, the Americas, and Asia, I argue that Colonial Latin America cannot be understood in isolation from other geographical regions, or from the trans-oceanic and global exchanges, from which it emerged. Another aim is to understand the development of the Spanish and Portuguese empires as the outcome of trans-oceanic networks that established global connections among distant regions of the world. By studying these reciprocal influences we can begin to move beyond the confines and limitations of geographically bound and closed entities in our analysis of the Iberian empires.

Center for Jewish Studies 2009-2010 Colloquium Series. Led by Michelle Hamilton.

Jewish literature in Hebrew written in the fifteenth century reflects not only the Arabic and Jewish traditions cultivated on the Peninsula in the so-called "Golden Age" of the 11th and 12th centuries, but also, increasingly, the Latin and Romance traditions of Christian Europe. The latter, as Jonathan Decter points out, have not received the critical attention of the former among the critical studies of Hebraists. In this paper I will focus on how fifteenth-century works (including an aljamiado ars memorativa, the coplas de Seneca and the Danza de la muerte), whose subject matter anticipate not only a sensibility of commemoration that resonates with contemporary theories of regret and remembering, but also provide a material artifact (manuscript) that had as its purpose an aid to memory. And while what is to be remembered, classical refrains, poems, and a didactic dialogue on death, could be read according to the standard narratives of Jewish history (according to which the Jews of fifteenth-century Spain were embroiled in the throws of a persecuting society), they also, though reveal a different picture of the past--a glimpse of a Jewish public that considered (allowed) many of the elements of the Christian past as (to be) part of their own.

About the Program

The elegance of Europe and the spirit of South America live side by side in Buenos Aires. Founded by immigrants along the shores of Rio de la Plata, Buenos Aires built its identity on Spanish, Italian, and French influences, which appear in the grand boulevards, expansive parks, and magnificent architecture.
This course focuses on the complex issues surrounding human rights in Argentina: the gripping stories of the thousands of desaparecidos or disappeared, and the dedication of artists, activists, and cultural workers whose work is to interpret the past in their push for social justice.

Excursions
Several excursions will be planned to illuminate the course topic and introduce students to Argentine culture. Possible excursions include:

Cultural Experiences:

Explore an estancia (ranch): San Antonio de Areco
See Memory Park and ESMA (former detention center)
Trip to Tigre Delta on the Rio de la Plata
Stay with an Argentine family
Attend a tango show
Travel to Colonia, Uruguay

Center of Legal and Social Studies
Human Rights Movement
Madres/Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo

including a guided walking tour of Buenos Aires Housing & Meals

Students live in homestays with other program participants. Families will provide students with two meals a day. A welcome dinner and a farewell dinner with a tango show are included in the program fee. During the overnight stay in Montevideo breakfast will be provided in the hotel. Additional meals can be taken in local eateries.

Faculty Leader

Dr. Angela Carlson-Lombardi has taught language and culture in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies for the last 11 years. She lived in Buenos Aires for a year and a half and also conducted two field research trips there for her doctoral dissertation.

23329|23088|23030 Thu, 18 Feb 2010 13:01:21 -0600

Thursday, February 18, 2010
Campus Club West Wing Dining Room

The menu for this buffet takes us around the Portuguese-speaking world and tastefully demonstrates how Portugal and its former colonies influenced each other's culinary traditions.

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/spanport/spanport/2010/01/portuguese-encounters-buffet-a.html 215088

Thursday, February 18, 2010
Campus Club West Wing Dining Room

The menu for this buffet takes us around the Portuguese-speaking world and tastefully demonstrates how Portugal and its former colonies influenced each other's culinary traditions.

Social Hour at 5:00.

Seating at 5:30.

Brazilian Guitar Stylings by Pavel Jany

Progam at 6:15
Featured Speaker Cherie Hamilton

Our presenter, Cherie Hamilton is fluent in Portuguese and has traveled extensively throughout the Portuguese-speaking world. She began collecting recipes in Brazil, where she became fascinated by the Portuguese, Native America, and African influences on Brazilian cuisine, and continued her culinary research in other former Portuguese colonies. She has written three major cookbooks: Cuisines of Portuguese Encounters, Brazil: A Culinary Journey, and O Sabor da Lusofonia: Encontro de Culturas. She holds a dual degree in Cultural Anthropology and Business Administration. She has lectured on Brazilian cuisine in many venues, including the Middlebury College Portugese Language School and the Brazilian TV programme, 'Arte na Mesa (Art on the Table)'.

Salada de Beterraba
Beet Salad from Mozambique

Cozido Goesa
Beef and Pork Stew from Goa

Guisado de São Nicolau
Vegetable Ragout from Cape Verde

Arroz de Tomate
Rice with Tomatoes from Guinea Bissau

Quindim
Golden Dessert from Brazil

Reservations are required.

Please call 612-626-7788.

$25.99 includes coffee and tax.
$12.99 Student rate.

Non-members are welcome and you must make a reservation in advance. Please bring a check for $25.99 per person, payable to the Campus Club.

23084|23329|23032 Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:43:47 -0600

Professor Amy Kaminsky is a professor of Global Studies and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, and she is also a member of the graduate faculty of Spanish and Portuguese Studies. She specializes in Latin American literature and film, and she teaches and writes about them in relation to theories of sexuality, gender, race, and nation. Her teaching style is informal, and she encourages independent, courageous thinking. If you'd like to read an article she wrote about one of the movies we'll be discussing, click on this link: Garage Olimpo

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/spanport/spanport/2009/12/spring-2010-graduate-courses-w.html 210327

SPAN 8900, section 002 Professor Amy Kaminsky
Seminar: Gender, Ethnicity, and Representation in Argentina

We will consider a variety of film and literary texts that deal with the mutual construction of gender, ethnicity, and nation in Argentina, with primary emphasis on Jewish texts. Readings include works by Alberto Gerchunoff, Angelica Gorodischer, Alicia Kozameh, Nora Strejilevich, Marcelo Birmajer, Alicia Partnoy, Ricardo Feierstein, and Sergio Chejfec. Films include "Sisters," "The Empty Nest," and "Autumn Sun." We will also discuss visual art by Marcelo Brodsky and Mirta Kupferminc.

All the literary texts will be available in both English and Spanish; most critical and theoretical texts are in English.The grade will be determined by participation in seminar discussions, presentations of course material, and a seminar paper. Students may write the seminar paper in English or Spanish.

GloS 4910/4390 GWSS: Sexuality and Film in Latin America

We will look at the way films from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico negotiate a range of sexualities with reference to such social and political issues as military dictatorship, exile, and economic crisis in Argentina; Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union; and class issues in Brazil and Mexico. Among the films we will screen and discuss are Doña Herlinda and her Son; Waiting for the Messiah; Martin (H); Vera; Strawberry and Chocolate; Garage Olimpo; I, the Worst of All; and Y tu mama también. We will also read one novel (The Kiss of the Spiderwoman), which links film culture and homoeroticism to military rule and resistance, as well as some film history and criticism. Students will be expected to write responses to the films and readings, lead class discussion, and write a 15-20 page term paper.

23329|23090|23031 Tue, 15 Dec 2009 18:09:49 -0600

A former student remembers our colleague René Jara

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/spanport/spanport/2009/11/for-professor-rene-jara-who-kn.html 202548

When I first began taking courses with Professor Jara, I was going through another round of undergraduate work, having discovered that I loved the Spanish language and its literature, and needed to know more of the cultures and struggles of Latin Americans. I did not actually know then that I was part Sephardic; I had not had the experience of meeting "cousins" in New Mexico who were descended from Sephardic Jews also expelled from Spain hundreds of years ago, nor had I had the experience of the caretaker of a synagogue in Istanbul taking one look at me and speaking to me in Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish language the Sephardim took with them into diaspora.

But I was indeed in love with Spanish, and a bit terrified of returning to school after a rough coming of age in New York, and plenty of blows telling me I simply was not good enough to learn much of anything. In secret I had been reading the poems of Neruda and Lorca, Vallejo and Hernandez, out loud, and struggling from page to page to decipher them. After moving to Minnesota from the east coast, I pushed past fear to return to school, and suddenly I was in René's class. And I kept taking René's classes, semester after semester.

This man could drink coffee, and indeed did. Way too much. I doubted he slept at all; indeed, who could, having read as much as he did? And loving every word, clearly. I wrote down as much of what he said as I could, and I know that he found those notebooks quite, let's say, complete. I don't doubt that writing out what he said in class has contributed to what I do know of the Spanish language. There are still moments, after years of having dropped the work to concentrate on the English language in my own writing of poetry and fiction, that my tongue is freed and my Spanish moves well.

What I found in studying with René was enormous intellectual stimulation; an infinite passion for language, for the complexities of texts and the mysteries they hold; a way for a fierce sense of justice to be incorporated into the hard good work of university teaching; and an embrace of all of his students, me included. What I found that was absolutely irreplaceable for me was a brilliant and passionate scholar and a master teacher who somehow managed to convey to me that I was, indeed, quite smart myself. This may not mean a great deal for some people, but with my origins, this was life-changing, and it is something I have worked to do and continue doing in my own teaching: to convey my true belief in the gifts of the people with whom I work.

I always connected to the things he told me about his life growing up in Chile, most especially that his mother was illiterate. (Perhaps my memory is wrong; perhaps his mother was college-educated, a teacher, but my memory holds this conversation.) I always sensed that he was speaking for more than himself, and his hunger for reading and learning was something I could understand from my own experience, my own background.

I cannot recall his support of the best in me, of that synthesis of the very cerebral and the very compassionate, without a deep sense of grief at the loss of René, too early, nor without knowing that this very thing, this support, is something he was able to give many more than me. He was excited about my work, or seemed so. He trusted me to translate a paper of his for a presentation at the MLA, although I was much more of a beginner than not. And he praised the results. He read my first book of poetry, published shortly after I received my degree from the University of Minnesota, and praised it as well, likely beyond what it deserved, perhaps because he knew that it was an opening to more, a synthesis of hard knocks and whatever gift of language lived within me. He wrote me letters of recommendation that were more complete and specific than I have ever seen anyone else do, even for their best students. I tend to write letters like these, I realize.

I left Minnesota, but every few years or so got in touch with René, and never worried that he would not remember me or would not welcome me. I occasionally visited, breathing in deeply the air of his office, and knowing it was food for someone hungry to go home to language and literature in this disciplined and joyful way. I brought him my next book of poetry. He saw the growth. He never failed me, ever. Neither in being a wonder to talk with, nor an ally in a profound sense.

I was so happy as he made a family, put on a few pounds. I remember those days when his diet of coffee and (I think I recall) many cigarettes kept him thin. The last time I saw him was before his surgery, and I was so happy to hear from him afterward, and imagine him reading as much and whatever he pleased, and spending time with family and friends.

My memory can locate in those piles of notebooks from René's classes a phrase of his lecture--perhaps his own; perhaps a quote (and if this is a known phrase and you have the source, please inform me!)--that poetry is: words searching for other words; palabras buscando palabras.

This phrase reminds me that René's words seemed always to be searching for other words on this poetic road, and that he searched for the poetry in his students. For many of us, his search was so skillful, so loving and knowledgeable, that it yielded up the poetry in our hearts and minds, in a language we had not known we possessed.

Anya Achtenberg
www.anyaachtenberg.com

23084|23329 Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:49:33 -0600

This Colloquium Series and International Conference will explore the role that the recent exhumations of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War and subsequent dictatorship have had in the emergence of the movement for the "recovery of historical memory" in Spain.

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/spanport/spanport/2009/10/announcing-colloquium-series-a.html 197822

At the beginning of the 21st century, over 30,000 bodies were still interred in mass graves throughout the country. Subsequently, the emergence of civic associations, created by ordinary citizens to undertake exhumations of these graves, has had an enormous impact on Spanish society. In part, the media impact of the exhumations has led to pressure to pass the "Law of Historical Memory" by the Spanish Congress in October 2007, a significant, if insufficient, step towards confronting the legacy of the war and dictatorship in contemporary Spanish society. We will analyze the multiple and complex relations between bodies and knowledge that arise in such exhumations and discuss their political, social, cultural and legal significance, in Spain and in other post-authoritarian or post-conflict settings.

For further information and updates to the Schedule of events, click here.

All colloquiums from 3:30 - 5:00 in room 614 Social Science Building

October 30, 2009
Colloquium Topic: Cries and Whispers: Exhuming and Narrating Defeat in Spain Today by Francisco Ferrándiz

December 11, 2009
Colloquium Topic: TBA

January 29, 2010
Colloquium Topic: TBA

February 26, 2010
Colloquium Topic: TBA

March 26, 2010
Colloquium Topic: TBA

April 23-24, 2010 Room 101, University International Center
International Conference

*Please read scheduled readings in advance of colloquium.

Conference and colloquiums are open to interested faculty, graduate students, and K-14 teachers.

This event is part of the Body and Knowing Symposium of the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota.

Sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, and the European Studies Consortium at the University of Minnesota, as well as the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain's Ministry of Culture and US Universities.

23329|23085 Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:19:13 -0600

Fall 2009: Colloquia Series
Interdisciplinary Graduate Group on Human Rights and Transitional Justice.
Free and open to the public. Food will also be served!

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/spanport/spanport/2009/10/you-are-invited-joseph-m-towle.html 195177

"Understanding the Problem of Child Soldiering:
Organizational Representations and Responses."
Amelia Cotton Corl, PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology
and
"We're Just Characters in a Novel: Human Rights
Observation in Zapatista Rebel Territory."
Joseph M. Towle. PhD Candidate, Spanish and Portuguese

When: Wednesday October 7 Time: 4 - 6PM Where: Room 260, Social Sciences Bldg., University of Minnesota, 267 19th Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55455

For more information: 'PejuSolarin @ sola0020@umn.edu
Funding for thid series comes from The Graduate School

23087|23031 Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:29:15 -0600

SPACO (the Spanish and Portuguese undergraduate student organization) has a lot of wonderful activities coming up within the next few weeks!

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/spanport/spanport/2009/09/spaco-welcome-event-conversati-1.html 190498

Conversation Hours

If students would like practice your Spanish/and or Portuguese outside of the classroom, join other students at our Spanish and Portuguese Conversation Hours held every Thursday (beginning Thursday, September 17th) from 4:00-6:00 p.m. in the Library Room of Bordertown Coffee (mmmm, banana bread!). Conversation Hours will be held every Thursday that the U is in session.

Welcome Back Event

If students would like to learn more about SPACO, participate in activities and meet other students interested in Spanish and Portuguese join us for our First ever Welcome Back event. This event will take place in room 140 Nolte center on Thursday, September 17th from 6:30-8:00 p.m., we will have pizza, soda, chips, salsa, etc. Music, activities, and more! All are welcome! If students are interested in this event, please RSVP to Maryanne at will2381@umn.edu. SPACO holds volunteer activities, social events (salsa nights, dinner and a movie, etc) throughout the year. If you are interested in joining or learning more, please contact Maryanne.

Study Abroad Panel

Interested in Studying Abroad?
Want to hear more about study abroad experiences from students who have already studied abroad? Wondering about how study abroad classes can transfer to your Spanish Studies or Spanish/Portuguese major or minor? Come hear from current U of M students who have recently studied abroad as they explain the application process, how to choose a program, what the experience was like, etc. The panel will take place on Friday, October 2nd from 1:30-3:00 p.m. in room 140 Nolte. Please RSVP to Maryanne at will2381@umn.edu.

23085|23030 Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:36:33 -0600

Our department works closely with the CLA Language Center in Jones Hall, also called LC (or Elsie!). They have made some changes to their web site: check out the many valuable resources they have available for students and instructors of second langauge, literature and culture.

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/spanport/spanport/2009/09/get-to-know-the-cla-language-c.html 190110

Their Language Resources page has links to podcasts and other online resources. Their multimedia development lab provides resources and assistance for instructors developing multimedia material for their classes. Are you using Twitter? so is Elsie.

The CLA Language Center's Annual Sundae Social

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

12:30 PM - 2:30 PM

Behind Jones Hall, Green Area

Join the CLA Language Center in Recognition of Second Language, Culture, and Literature Instructors and Support Staff.

A vegan alternative will be available.

23087|23034 Tue, 08 Sep 2009 16:10:06 -0600

Congratulations to all the graduate students who received awards to conduct research, travel, deliver papers at national and international conferences. Click on the title of this post to see the entire list.

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/spanport/spanport/2009/05/graduate-student-research-and.html 181649

Graduate Student Announcements & Awards 2008-2009

Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship
Kelly McDonough received the 2009-10 Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for her dissertation in progress: "Reading and Writing Nahuas: Tracing the Nahuatl Intelletual Tradition."

Graduate Research Partnership Program (GRPP) Summer 2009:
Michael Stannard "Degeneration Theory in the Naturalist Novels of Benito Pérez Galdós."
Joseph Towle "Sustaining Revolution in the Mexican State of Chiapas."
Naomi Wood "Dancing History and Marginality: Hip-hop in Cuba, Brazil and the Diaspora."

FLAS Fellowship 2009-2010: Daniel Arbino has been awarded a Summer FLAS and an AY 2009-2010 FLAS to study of Dutch.

Graduate School Fellowship for entering student: 2008-2009: Megan Strom

Fall 2008 Conference Travel Grants:
Marcela Garces- "Voices and Visions: The Madrid Movida in Recent Films," San Antonio, TX
Sara Mack- "A Laboratory Perspective on Perceptions of Sexual Orientation," Austin, TX.
Kelly McDonough- "Indigenous Languages as Modern Languages" MLA, San Francisco, CA
Sarah Miller-Boelts- "Mothers and Daughters in Contemporary Cuban Literature: Zoe Valdes and Mayra Montero" Atlanta, GA
Naomi Wood- "Dancing to Make Space: Cuban HipHop Trio Las Krudas and Performances of Social Change," Roanoke, VA
Megan Strom- "The use of the term "illegal alien' by U.S. Politicians and its perception by Latino Immigrants", Orlando, FL
Hector Reyes Zaga- "La Política migratoria estadounidense desde la perspectivea de los derechos humanos" Heredia, Costa Rica
Carlos Vargas-Salgado- "Hablar en necio para darle gusto: vicisitudes de una puesta de El Perro del Hortelano en el periodo de violencia Politica en Peru" MLA, San Francisco, CA
Angela Pinilla-Herrar-2008 ACTFL Annual Confernece add'l funding from CLA), Orlando, FL

Spring 2009 Conference and Research Travel Grants:
Daniel Arbino- "Cultures in Flux: Movements, Ruptures & (Re)Structures," Columbus, Oh.
Adriana Gordillo- VIII Congreso Internacional de Literatura Hispanic, Puntarenas, Costa Rica
Kajsa Larson- "Fractured identities," Cardiff, Wales
Kelly McDonough- Archival Research for dissertation chapter & interviews, Mexico City
Mandy Menke- Child Phonology Conference 2009, Austin, TX
Angela Pinila-Herrera- 3rd Heritage Language Summer Inst., Univ. Illinois Urbana
Joseph Towle- "Sustaining Revolution in the Mexican State of Chiapas" Chiapas & Mexico City & Research:NDSU,
Karin Whitehouse- XVII annual Conference in Romance Language, Boston Coll., MA

MLA Travel Grants:
Sarah Miller-Boelts
Sara Mack
Marcus Brasileiro
Eric Dickey

23031 Thu, 28 May 2009 08:49:35 -0600

Congratulatioins to two undergraduate students who have been awarded Fulbright Teaching Assistantship Grants to work and learn abroad.

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/spanport/spanport/2009/05/fulbright-awards-for-students.html 180953

Jillian Stein, a 2009 summa cum laude candidate for a bachelor's in Spanish studies and bachelor's in Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, received a Fulbright Teaching Assistant Grant to Spain. Stein will serve as a teaching assistant in English classes at a secondary school. She also intends to volunteer at a speech therapy clinic or women's organization in the community.

Antoni Tang, a 2009 candidate for bachelor's degrees in marketing and African American/African Studies, with a Spanish Studies minor, received one of only three available Fulbright Teaching Assistant Grants to Venezuela. Tang will help to teach English to pre-teen and teenage students. He plans to volunteer with an Afro-Venezuelan organization in the community and plans to learn about Afro-Venezuelan movements for social justice.
Our warmest congratulatons to both of them and best wishes for their endeavors in Spain and Venezuela!

23091|23029|23030 Wed, 20 May 2009 08:31:05 -0600

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies extends its warmest congratulations to all graduate students who successfully completed exams this academic year!

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/spanport/spanport/2009/05/graduate-student-milestones.html 180471

MA Prelims:The following students have successfully completed their Masters degree!
Karin Whitehouse
Daniela Goldfine
Sean Raley
Kristin Powell,
Angela George

PhD Prelims: The following students are now A.B.D.!
Joseph Towle
Naomi Wood
Nelly Pilares
Katherine Ostrom

PhD Defense: The following students have completed their Ph.D.!
Gerardo Chavana
Hector Reyes-Zaga
Sara Mack
Deyanira Rojas-Sosa

23329|23031 Fri, 15 May 2009 09:27:14 -0600

Congratulations to Christopher Clark, our wonderful Folwell Hall building maintenance staff person, who has been awarded the University of Minnesota President's Award for Outstanding Service! This award recognizes exceptional service to the University, its schools, colleges, departments and service units by faculty and staff.

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/spanport/spanport/2009/05/chris-clark-receives-u-of-mns.html 179893

"This award recognizes exceptional service to the University, its schools, colleges, departments and service units by any active or retired member of the faculty or staff. Such service must have gone well beyond the regular duties of a faculty or a staff member, and demonstrate unusual commitment to the University community."

All of us in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies are thrilled on behalf of Chris Clark, and thank him for his part in making Folwell Hall the winner of this year's "Beautiful Building" award in Facililties Management as well. Thank you, Chris!

23329 Mon, 11 May 2009 09:07:15 -0600

Join us for our End-of-Year Celebration!

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/spanport/spanport/2009/05/endoftheyear-party-thurs-may-7-1.html 179105

Thursday, May 7, 2009

2:30 - 4:30 p.m.

140 Nolte Center

Food will be served and prizes will be given!!!
Please RSVP to spanport@umn.edu

23085|23029|23032 Mon, 04 May 2009 08:40:43 -0600

Visiting Professor Jaime Ginzburg will be delivering a series of lectures on Critical Theory. This is an extracurricular activity in connection with the research interests of graduate students from our Department. The meetings will be conducted in English. The subjects may be related to Latin American intellectuals and writers of interest to students in Spanish and Portuguese.

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/spanport/spanport/2009/05/critical-theory-lecture-series-1.html 178925

The meetings will include theoretical and conceptual approaches, bibliographical comments and discussions on literary and cultural production. No prior registration is required. This is an extracurricular activity that entails no grade or credit.

Thursdays, starting 9 am.
April 16 - Room 12 Folwell
April 23 - Room 12 Folwell
April 30 - Room 426 Folwell
May 7 - Room 12 Folwell

23091|23031|23033|23030 Fri, 01 May 2009 15:30:29 -0600

"Memory is like the blood of time, and we are seeking the DNA
of broken dreams, of lost Memory; blocked, silenced, exiled."
—Viviana Ponieman, visual artist, writing about the memory of the disappeared in Argentina.

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/spanport/spanport/2009/04/may-term-in-buenos-aires-the-i.html 178510

The Intersection of Culture and Human Rights

What is the relationship between human rights, repression and culture? How did visual artists, writers, activists and lawyers respond to the disappearance of over 10,000 people during the brutal years of the military dictatorship in Argentina? These were just a few of the questions we set out to investigate during the May Term Global Seminar "Human Rights and Collective Memory in Buenos Aires" in May of 2008. The experience was a success, and a new group will return to Buenos Aires for May Term 2009.

While violations of human rights during the decades of the 1970's and 80's were not unique to Argentina, the response of those most closely affected by violence and disappearance is singular and moving. During the first Global Seminar session in 2008, students became familiarized with the complex issues surrounding human rights in Argentina, and heard first hand the gripping stories concerning the thousands of desaparecidos or disappeared. While visiting the "Casa de las Madres," or the house of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, students dialogued with women whose lives were forever changed when their children disappeared. Mirta, Nora and Carmen - tireless human rights activists who are now in their 80's - recounted the night their children were taken from their homes never to return. Well-known author Liliana Heker shared her reflections with the class about living under the military regime and how she took a stand against repression via the written word. Marcelo Brodsky's testimony of nearly being "disappeared" himself became all the more poignant once we viewed his photographic essay along with the last image of his brother Fernando - an image that was smuggled out of the clandestine torture center where he was detained.

While in Buenos Aires students also visited the art studio of Viviana Ponieman, a painter who has interpreted the events of the military period in large-scale paintings and via public art installations. One of the foremost NGOs in Argentina, the Center for Legal and Social Studies, informed students of the legal perspective towards human rights violations. Students also had the opportunity to attend a hearing where lawyers presented a 30-year-old case of a crime against humanity committed during the military regime. One of the highlights of the Global Seminar was a visit to our class by Julio César Strassera, the prosecuting attorney at the Trial of the Juntas, where military leaders were put on trial for their actions during the "Dirty War." Strassera's powerful lecture reflected his singular commitment to justice and determination to bring those responsible to trial- a first in the world-wide struggle for human rights.

Besides lectures and site visits in Buenos Aires, the Global Seminar gave students the chance to volunteer at a local community service organization in La Boca, an underprivileged neighborhood in the capital. Weekend excursions included a visit to a "hacienda," where students enjoyed typical Argentine food and were led by gauchos on a picturesque horseback ride through the "pampa húmeda;" a trip to Montevideo, Uruguay to see the Monument to the Disappeared; and a student-led trip to Iguazú Falls, one of the most impressive natural attractions in Argentina.

Aside from the academic component of the course, all the students received a healthy dose of Argentine culture, which included dining on pasta, pizza, empanadas and free-range beef; attending late night tango shows and taking tango lessons; consuming inordinate amounts of "dulce de leche" and ice cream; and going to bed after 3 in the morning on more than one occasion.

For more information about the May term Global Seminar, click here. FFI: contact Angela Carlson-Lombardi.

23032|23088 Wed, 29 Apr 2009 10:12:24 -0600

We would like to extend our warm congratulations to two of our department’s undergraduate students who were awarded the Selmer Birkelo Scholarship for 2009-2010. These students are Chelsey Rosetter (Spanish Studies major) and Elizabeth Troolin (Spanish Studies and Political Science double major). They were two of only fourteen students in CLA to receive this award! !Enhorabuena!

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/spanport/spanport/2009/04/congratulations-selmer-birkelo.html 177916

To be considered for a Birkelo Scholarship, students must be majoring in fields relating to history, modern languages, classics, or the social and behavioral sciences and must be nominated to the Office of the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs by their major department. For the 2009-10 academic year Birkelo Scholarship recipients will receive up to $4,000, depending on financial need.
The Selmer Birkelo Scholarships provide one year of scholarship support for approximately 14 outstanding CLA students majoring in fields relating to history, modern languages, classics, or the social and behavioral sciences.

To be considered for Birkelo Scholarship students must intend to pursue a degree from the College of Liberal Arts and may not be enrolled in any other college. The scholarships are awarded on the basis of academic merit, with particular attention paid to depth of study in the major, general breadth of coursework, and clarity of academic purpose. For more information on CLA scholarship available to undergraduates, click here.

23329|23091|23030 Sat, 25 Apr 2009 10:14:50 -0600 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/spanport/spanport/2009/04/international-symposium-on-pop.html 177914

Professor Fernando Arenas is the organizer of our Department's International Symposium on Popular Music Studies: African Musics of the Portuguese- and French-speaking Worlds. The event kicked off with a screening at the Walker Art Center of Fados, another music film by Carlos Saura, in collaboration with the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Film Festival (MSPIFF). You can hear some fado music here. The relation between the European colonial powers and their former colonies, the voyages and exchanges of people, rhythms and their musical practices is a passion shared by many in our department, so the opportunity to hear them share their work in this area was very exciting.

The program included talks on: music in African cinema, Congolese Rumba in all its forms, the music of Cape Verde and especially the "divas" such as Cesaria Evoria who sing in Kriolu, the emergence of Kriolu rap (not well-known at all in the U.S.) and presentations on Mozambican and Angolan music in the struggles and politics of those countries. The keynote by world-renowned ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik brought us us a glimpse of his fifty years of engagement with the musics of Africa and the African Diaspora.

Off-campus, the Cedar Cultural Center hosted the Cape Verdian singer Carmen Souza, and Monday April 27, Gerhard Kubik presents another talk about his experiences as a jazz musician and scholar of music in South Africa: "Transformations and Reinterpretations of American Jazz: An Inside acount of Jazz Performances in Southern Africa, 1960s to Now".

Professor Arenas' talk about Cape Verdean singers gave us a historical and cultural context for understanding the appearance on world scene of singers such as Césaria Evora, Lura, Mayra Andrade, and Carmen Souza .

Did you attend any of the events? Your comments and questions are welcome! More details, links, and pictures to come.

23085|23029|23032 Sat, 25 Apr 2009 09:34:32 -0600 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/spanport/spanport/2009/04/have-you-read-this-book.html 177708

At the Fifth Summit of the Americas meeting where President Obama met with the leaders of 34 nations of the Americas, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela gave President Obama a copy of Eduardo Galenao's 1971 book Las venas abiertas de América Latina (translated into English as Open Veins of Latin America). Immediately, sales figures on Amazon.com shot up as people bought the book to read on their own. Have you read this book? do you plan to read it? What do you think of this global "lesson" in light of your own experience or studies of Latin America?

23084|23029 Thu, 23 Apr 2009 10:52:30 -0600

Spanish 5526/Fall 2009Global Colonial Studies in the Hispanic World, 1492-1600

Thursday 2:30-5:00 pm. Professor: Raúl Marrero-Fente
FFI: rmarrero@umn.edu

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/spanport/spanport/2009/04/new-graduate-course.html 177702

Course Description: The course is devoted to the origins of Global Colonialism in the Hispanic World during the 16th-century, by focusing on the cultural production and practices in the regions. The course examines the role of colonial discourse as producer of the epistemic colonial difference, and explores the legacies of Spanish colonialism in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. The course will introduce students to this research field through the study of academic and specialized discourse pertaining to the humanities and the social sciences. The course provides training in analytical thinking and cultural critique of colonialism and imperialism, by bringing a global perspective to our curriculum. The course will focus on critical readings and discussion of cultural artifacts, maps, texts and documents of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Spain. Studies will include material pertaining to the aural and visual production of the period, including Spanish accounts of the conquest, and indigenous accounts of resistance to the conquest. All readings are available as electronic texts.

Required Readings:

Cristóbal Colón, Diario del primer viaje

Bartolomé de Las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias

Hernán Cortés, Segunda carta de relación de la conquista de la Nueva España

Hernán Pérez de Oliva, Historia de la invención de las Indias

Visión de los Vencidos (Ed. Miguel León Portilla)

Guamán Poma de Ayala, Nueva coronica y buen gobierno

Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Naufragios

Isabel de Guevara, Carta a la princesa Juana

Diego de Torres. Relación del origen y suceso de los xarifes y del estado de los reinos de Marruecos, Fez y Tarudante.

Juan González de Mendoza. Historia del gran reino de la China.

Gabriel Quiroga de San Antonio y Rodrigo de Vivero. Relaciones de la Camboya y el Japón.

Antonio Pigafetta. Primer viaje alrededor del mundo

23090|23029|23031|23034 Thu, 23 Apr 2009 10:44:44 -0600

Critical Theory Lecture Series for Graduate Students

Visiting Professor Jaime Ginzburg, will be delivering a series of lectures on Critical Theory. This is an extracurricular activity in connection with the research interests of graduate students from our Department. The meetings will be conducted in English. The subjects may be related to Latin American intellectuals and writers of interest to students in Spanish and Portuguese.

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/spanport/spanport/2009/04/critical-theory-lecture-series.html 177921

The meetings will include theoretical and conceptual approaches, bibliographical comments and discussions on literary and cultural production. No prior registration is required. This is an extracurricular activity that entails no grade or credit.

Thursdays, starting 9 am.
April 16 - Room 12 Folwell
April 23 - Room 12 Folwell
April 30 - Room 426 Folwell
May 7 - Room 12 Folwell

23029|23031 Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:32:42 -0600 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/spanport/spanport/2009/04/eduardo-garcia-aguilar-visits.html 177920

Author and journalist Eduardo García Aguilar visited our department and generously took part in two conversations with our community, in spite of suffering from laryngitis during his stay in Minneapolis. García Aguilar (b. Manizales, Colombia) has had a prolific literary career, including the publication of four novels, several collections of short stories and poetry, as well as book-length studies of such writers as Gabriel García Márquez, Alvaro Mutis, and Voltaire. Currently, he is a journalist with Agence France-Press on Latin American affairs, and also publishes widely in the Latin American press. He published his first article in Colombia when he was fifteen, studied in Paris and Berkeley, going on to work and publish for fifteen years in Mexico before returning to Paris where he lives today. You can find a list of his publications available on Amazon.com here.

"The Triumphant Voyage: A Novelist's Journey Through Literary Modernism"
Friday, April 10, 3:00pm, 134 Folwell Hall

The Triumphant Voyage (English translation by Jay Miskowiec of El viaje triunfal, and winner, 2008 National Translation Grant, Ministry of Culture of Colombia) recounts the travels of the fictional modernist poet Arnaldo Faría Utrillo during the first half of the twentieth century. From jungle pyramids to the streets of Rome and Paris, from surviving shipwrecks and earthquakes to witnessing the advent of la violencia in Colombia, the reader goes along on the adventures of this "professional foreigner."
In this presentation, García Aguilar and Miskowiec (translator and publisher of Aliform Books) read from the Spanish and English versions of his novel The Triumphal Voyage, and answered questions about modernism, the avant-garde in Latin America, the participation of women writers in literary production, and the generation of writers whose work was overshadowed for a time by attention to the "boom" writers. The audience included undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and visitors from the general community. We are grateful to both speakers for their generosity in sharing their work and experience with us. The MN Daily published this article.

He and Jay Miskowiec also visted Professor Joanna O'Connell's graduate course "La transmisión de la palabra" where we conversed at length, in spite of his laryngitis, about a variety of topics, ranging from his own career as an author and journalist to his impressions of how emerging digital formats are changing writing and publishing worldwide. He also shared his most recent article, published in Excélsior, the Mexican newspaper where he has a column, on Obama's speech in Strasbourg. You can read this article and more on his blog Eduardo Garcia Aguilar: BLOG LITERARIO DESDE PARÍS .

23085|23029|23032 Wed, 15 Apr 2009 10:50:30 -0600

Cuba and the Atlantic World: Celebrating 400 years of Espejo de paciencia

An event on the cultural production and transatlantic relations between Cuba, Africa, and Spain. Friday, April 3, 1:00pm - 4:00pm, 426 Folwell Hall

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/spanport/spanport/2009/04/cuba-and-the-atlantic-world-ce.html 177915

Panelists:

* Alejandro de la Fuente, University of Pittsburgh "Cuba and the Atlantic in the 16th century"
* Juana Goergen, De Paul University "Hibridez de la épica en Espejo de paciencia"
* Raúl Marrero-Fente, University of Minnesota "Africa and the Atlantic in Espejo de paciencia"
* Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota "On Freedom: the Problem of Pop Music Studies when it Talks about Cuba"

Para leer el texto digitalizado del Espejo de Paciencia [read the digitalized texto of the Espejo de Paciencia] haga clic aquí
Wikipedia describe el Espejo de Paciencia así. OJO a los expertos: Uds pueden editar la entrada en Wikipedia si encuentran errores o quieren añadir algo.

23085|23032 Sun, 05 Apr 2009 09:58:25 -0600