Thursday, November 7 | 1:00 PM | Virtual
Levan Book Chats—Roberto Ignacio Diaz, Latin America and the Transports of Opera: Fragments of a Transatlantic DiscourseA discussion of Roberto Ignacio Diaz’s new book, Latin America and the Transports of Opera: Fragments of a Transatlantic Discourse (Vanderbilt University Press, 2024). The author will be joined in conversation by Efraín Kristal (University of California, Los Angeles) and Michelle Clayton (Brown University), moderated by Natania Meeker (USC). Organized in partnership with the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures. REGISTER
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About the Book: Latin America and the Transports of Opera studies a series of episodes in the historical and textual convergence of a hallowed art form and a part of the world often regarded as peripheral. Perhaps unexpectedly, the archives of opera generate new arguments about several issues at the heart of the established discussion about Latin America: the allure of European cultural models; the ambivalence of exoticism; the claims of nationalism and cosmopolitanism; and, ultimately, the place of the region in the global circulation of the arts. Opera’s transports concern literal and imagined journeys as well as the emotions that its stories and sounds trigger as they travel back and forth between Europe—the United States, too—and Latin America.
Focusing mostly on librettos and other literary forms, this book analyzes Calderón de la Barca’s baroque play on the myth of Venus and Adonis, set to music by a Spanish composer at Lima’s viceregal court; Alejo Carpentier’s neobaroque novella on Vivaldi’s opera about Moctezuma; the entanglements of opera with class, gender, and ethnicity throughout Cuban history; music dramas about enslaved persons by Carlos Gomes and Hans Werner Henze, staged in Rio de Janeiro and Copenhagen; the uses of Latin American poetry and magical realism in works by John Adams and Daniel Catán; and a novel by Manuel Mujica Lainez set in Buenos Aires’s Teatro Colón, plus a chamber opera about Victoria Ocampo with a libretto by Beatriz Sarlo. Close readings of these texts underscore the import and meanings of opera in Latin American cultural history. MORE
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About the Author: Roberto Ignacio Diaz is Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He researches Latin American literary and cultural history with a focus on transatlantic relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has previously written on multilingualism in Spanish American literature and on the prose of Jorge Luis Borges.
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About the Participants: Efraín Kristal is Distinguished Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at UCLA. He is a specialist of Latin American literature in comparative contexts, and of translation studies. He has published several single author and edited books including The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel, and over one hundred articles. He wrote the essay on philosophical and theoretical approaches to translation for the Blackwell Companion to Translation Studies, and an essay on Yves Bonnefoy engagements with Shakespeare for the Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry. His most recent book is Querencias. Guerra, traducción y filosofía en Jorge Luis Borges (Fondo de cultura económica, 2022).
Michelle Clayton is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature. Her research and teaching interests range over modern and contemporary Latin American literature, the historical avant-gardes, and interdisciplinary aesthetic practices. She is the author of Poetry in Pieces: César Vallejo and Lyric Modernity (University of California Press, 2011), and she has published articles on modernist and avant-garde experiments, on Latin American novelists, poets, and critics, and on intersections between dance and literature in journals such as the Revista de estudios hispánicos, Modernism/Modernity, Modernist Cultures, and Dance Research Journal as well as a number of edited volumes.
Natania Meeker is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on the relationship between theories of materiality and the poetic or figural production of subjectivities, human and non-human. She is most recently the co-author (with Antónia Szabari) of Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction (Fordham UP, 2019) and the author of Illusive Materialisms: The Pleasures of Femininity in Eighteenth-Century France (forthcoming from Fordham University Press). She has served as an invited professor at the Université de Paris Est-Marne la Vallée, where she is part of the working group “L’invisibilité et la visibilité des savoirs des femmes,” and was named a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques in 2017.
The Levan Institute for the Humanities hosts Book Chats, conversations celebrating new books by USC scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Open to attendants outside of USC. An excerpt of the book will be made available to registered attendants. Registration before the event is required.
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