Event Details

Speaker: Dr. Oswaldo Estrada, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Sponsored by Queens' Center for Latino Studies, the Department of Foreign Languages and the Office of Diversity and Inclusion

Taking into account the negative impact that religion, colonialism, nationalism and modernization have had on the representation of Mexican women, in this presentation professor Estrada analyzes very recent fictionalizations of historical and mythical female figures of the Mexican Revolution. Focusing exclusively on Mexican literature produced in the first decade of the twenty-first century, he explores why Mexico continues to revisit its revolutionary female icons in a globalized era; how historical female characters actually shape contemporary Mexican culture; and the innovative (and at times problematic) ways in which contemporary authors attempt to challenge a series of bad habits and tendencies attached to the historical and literary representation of a woman's life. In his talk, the critic will address, among other themes and topics, the role of memory and discourse; the inevitable formation of otherness; identity construction; gender ambiguities; moral subversions and inversions; and textual experimentation and performance.       

Oswaldo Estrada is an Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on the rewritings of history, historical memory, gender formation and transgression, and the construction of dissident identities in contemporary Mexico and Peru. He has published numerous articles in Latin America, Spain and the United States on colonial and contemporary literature, from Bernal Díaz del Castillo and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, to Rosario Castellanos, Carlos Monsiváis, Elena Poniatowska, and Mario Vargas Llosa, among others. He is the author of La imaginación novelesca. Bernal Díaz entre géneros y épocas (Iberoamericana / Vervuert 2009), and the editor and co-author of Cristina Rivera Garza. Ningún crítico cuenta esto... (Eón, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, UC-Mexicanistas, 2010).