LACLxS Work-In-Progress Seminar: Marina Bedran and Nicole Labruto

Description

The Program in Latin America, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies (LACLxS) is excited to present:

• Marina Bedran, assistant professor of Lusophone literatures and cultures in the Department of Modern Languages and Literature
• Nicole Labruto, assistant research professor in the Department of Anthropology and director of the Program in Medicine, Science, and the Humanities

Marina Bedran: "Turn to Amazonia: Development, Aesthetics, Polyculture"

This presentation draws from my book manuscript in progress, an interdisciplinary study of the artistic turn to Amazonia in postwar Brazil. Focusing on the work of Brazilian and Brazil-based artists from the 1950s through the late 1980s, I examine how they experimented with innovative aesthetic forms that heed Amazonia and, in so doing, articulate a critique of developmentalism and propose new ways of thinking about indigeneity, the environment, and the more-than-human. The book recovers a body of work often overlooked in cultural scholarship on Amazonia, yet, I argue, crucial in shaping public perceptions of the region. At a time when many prominent intellectuals, artists, and writers embraced modernizing principles centered on urban and industrial imaginaries, often in ways that reproduced the Brazilian government's rhetoric of political and economic progress and development, I demonstrate how formal experimentation opened up new ways of thinking about Amazonia that anticipate contemporary debates in posthumanism.

Nicole Labruto: "Cycles, Natural and Otherwise: Biotechnological Conversion in a Brazilian Laboratory"

The LACLxS Work-in-Progress Seminar series is run by graduate students Bruno Franco (Modern Languages and Literatures) and Matheus Mendoça (Sociology), where students and Johns Hopkins faculty will present their current projects.