The Program in Latina/o Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

No abstract available

Hemingway in the Dirt of a Blood and Soil Myth

Treats Hemingway’s identification of his Anglo-American heroes, Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises and Robert Jordan of For Whom the Bell Tolls, with the ideologically fascist infused “blood and soil” myth of 1920s and 1930s Spain. While Jake the tourist represents the instability of the first stage of the myth, Robert is the fully rooted and earth infused nonimpotent version of Jake in the second stage of the myth. Discusses at length the anti-Semitism and myth of the wandering Jew found in The Sun Also Rises

Mute Figuration of Minikins

No abstract available

Fatal Hieroglyph: Mexico for Writers of Exile Malcolm Lowry and William Burroughs

This essay explores the representation of Mexico in the work of British modernist writer of exile Malcolm Lowry and of U.S. Anglo-American post-war, postmodern writer of exile William Burroughs. Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947) and Burroughs’s trilogy The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket that Exploded (1962), and The Nova Express (1964) represent Mexico as a land of fatal hieroglyphs, as itself a fatal hieroglyph. Theoretically, a hieroglyph, as a condensation of space and time, is always already fatal—“an anticipation of the end in the beginning” [Jean Baudrillard]. The fatal sign constitutes an attempted exorcism of conventional reality governed by the status quo. For Lowry and Burroughs, Mexico as place and text is the locus of the exorcism of demons, personal and cultural. In turning Mexico into a fatal hieroglyph of doom, both modernist and postmodernist writers draw on a long tradition of stereotyping primitivizations of Mexico. However, in the cases of Lowry and Burroughs, these stereotypical primitivizations also function as alternative modes of knowledge, symbol-making, and anti-narration, deliberate plumbings of the non-linear, irrational, and trans-temporal to deliver a backhanded blow against the European and Gringo colonizer / conqueror in Lowry’s case and the malaise of Anglo-American military-industrial capitalism in Burroughs’s.

Creating & Performing Pinang & Ayu: A Love Story A Lesbian Shadow-Puppet Performance

18 p.Creating & Performing Pinang & Ayu: A Love Story A Lesbian Shadow-Puppet Performance: I fell in love with wayang kulit (Indonesian shadow-puppet theater) in Jan Mrázek’s art history class in 2003. This love led to my own performance, 6 years later, as a graduate student at the University of Oregon. On May 7th, 2009 I performed Pinang and Ayu: A Love Story, for my Folklore MA. The performance was largely collaborative, as I was working with Gamelan Sari Pandhawa of Eugene, OR, and I owe director Qehn considerable thanks for his guidance. The creative and learning processes, and of course the performance itself, were unforgettable experiences -- The Bailout Biennial (January 15 until April 15, 2009): How can and do we respond to the economic, political, and social world around us as artists at a time of heightened frenzy and pending doom? Can art shed some light on the current situation or poke some holes in the dull screen of it all