This conference seeks to explore the impact that the work of Helena María Viramontes and other Chicanx and Latinx writers, poets, and scholars have had in dealing with past and present cultural and political crises affecting communities of color nationally and across the earth. We invite you to join us in fostering a generative dialogue to find imaginative spaces for resisting the historically recurring violence and injustices committed against Chicanx and Latinx peoples, Black, Indigenous, Asian and LGBTQ persons, to name but a few. We also wish to explore
strategies of ‘resistance’ to injustice, what José Medina defines as the ‘the epistemology of resistance’ and Chela Sandoval, the ‘methodology of the oppressed.’ How can Viramontes’s work be read, reread, or re-envisioned to furnish new perspectives, tools, or resources to advance future counternarratives on a number of issues from immigration to multiculturalism? How does rethinking of Viramontes’s work propel other aesthetics? How can literatures respond in force to injustices and inhumanity? How can literatures and other fields of inquiry provide allied forms of art and activism by disrupting boundaries, boldly trespassing borders? Plenary speakers include Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Rosaura Sánchez, and María Herrera Sobek among others. There will also be a staged reading of the new play, “Their Dogs Came with Them,” adapted by Virginia Grise with original music written and performed by Martha Gonzales and Quetzal.
We invite you to submit paper proposals (250 words).
Email to svillenas@cornell.edu with the subject heading “HMV Conference.”
The deadline for submission is Monday, December 2, 2019.