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Come join the PLAS Lecture by Javier Guerrero on Tuesday, December 4th — 12pm — 216 Burr Hall

In this pre­sen­ta­tion, Javier Guer­rero exam­ines the rela­tion­ship between archive and plas­tic­ity through an explo­ration of the archive of the Cuban writer Reinaldo Are­nas, housed at the Fire­stone Library. The archive con­tains the suc­ces­sive rewrit­ings of Are­nas, a ten­dency that he shared with the lit­er­ary and polit­i­cal gen­er­a­tion that he led, as well as a pro­lif­er­a­tion of pho­tographs and visual records of the writer’s body. Together, these items not only ques­tion the pos­si­bil­ity and legit­i­macy of tex­tual and sex­ual orig­i­nals, but also allow a col­lec­tively writ­ten body that is rec­og­niz­able and intel­li­gi­ble sex­ual mat­ter to mate­ri­al­ize. This com­plex inter­sec­tion between archive and plas­tic­ity influ­ences that mat­ter directly, unleash­ing the sed­i­men­ta­tion of the body as a desta­bi­liz­ing polit­i­cal project. Guer­rero explores the body’s com­pli­cated trans­for­ma­tions as sex­ual and tex­tual mat­ter, tan­gi­ble in the con­fig­u­ra­tion of the visual archive of the writer, in order to exam­ine the effect of the rela­tion­ship between archive and plas­tic­ity on the intel­li­gi­bil­ity of dis­si­dent sen­si­bil­i­ties in Latin Amer­ica.
Free and open to the pub­lic.  Lec­ture in Spanish.

29. November 2012 by Rare Books and Special Collections
Categories: Events | Tags: archive, collection, Cuban, Firestone Library, princeton, Reinaldo Arenas, spanish | Leave a comment