The Passion of Victor Fragoso: Staging the Borders of Latinx Migrant Subjectivity in New York and Newark

Drawing on the resources of critical archive studies, Consuelo Martínez-Reyes' new translation of the Puerto Rican playwright and poet Victor Fragoso and the Center for Puerto Rican Studies' archival materials, this talk shows how Victor Fragoso's experimental theater of the 1970s enacts Latinx subjectivity in emergence and dissolution. Fragoso's recent republication parallels efforts at Rutgers--where Fragoso was the first director of the Puerto Rican Studies Program--to exhume the history of its Latino and Caribbean Studies Program. Fragoso's play "Call My Number," based on Julia de Burgos' poem of that name, and his essays about de Burgos stage the psychic violence and rupture faced by Hispanic Caribbean migrants upon arriving from militarily occupied rural working class communities to New York and New Jersey. Fragoso's work models a transdisciplinary, participatory, community-engaged approach and helps to define a still emergent Latinx Studies in the region, one that since the 1970s has worked in the borderlands of race, class, gender, sexuality, language, nationality and empire. 

 

About the Speaker: 

Laura Lomas, (Ph.D. English and Comparative Literature, Columbia; B.A. Swarthmore College) is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark, where she teaches Latina/o, comparative American literature and theory. Her book Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects and American Modernities (Duke 2008), won the MLA Prize for Latina/o and Chicana/o literature and an honorable mention from LASA's Latina/o Section. Lomas co-edited with John Morán González the Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature (2018)The recipient of two Fulbright Fellowships, a National Endowment for the Humanities, Whiting Fellowships and a Student-Government Teaching Award, Lomas serves on the Board of the Recovering of the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, and previously Directed the Women and Gender Studies Program, and Co-Directed the Latina/o Studies Working Group.

Tuesday, March 26, 2019 at 12:00pm

Gordon White Building (GWB), 2.206
210 24TH ST W, Austin, Texas 78705

Event Type

Arts & Humanities

Departments

College of Liberal Arts

Target Audience

Students, Staff, Faculty

Website

https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/cmas/e...

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