Coming to the Stanford Humanities Center on November 18 at 4:00 p.m., the 2024 Marta Sutton Weeks Lecture, “Caravaggio’s Americas” by the poet and scholar Edgar Garcia of the University of Chicago; the announcement:
This talk relocates the where and when of the baroque to the sixteenth-century Americas, arguing that the anxieties of eroded sovereignty amidst legal heterogeneity that gave rise to the baroque began not in Counter-Reformation responses to Protestantism but earlier in encounters with the legal and cultural others of the indigenous Americas. In this account, the spirit of the Counter Reformation precedes the Reformation and is, in its expression as the baroque, inescapably entangled with Indigenous cultures and polities of the Americas. In turn, this view of the baroque from the Americas helps to recast, interpret, and even re-visualize the works of the iconic late sixteenth-century Roman painter and living catastrophe-on-legs Caravaggio.
Dense with the abstract vocabulary of sociocultural analysis and cultural and literary history — it makes actual claims about the sources of the baroque / Baroque style in the Western arts, but it might take you some work to figure out what they are — the announcement devolves into a vividly earthy thumbnail characterization of Caravaggio as “the iconic late sixteenth-century Roman painter and living catastrophe-on-legs”. A sting in the tail. [Here we laugh and applaud.]
There are lots of Edgar Garcias, but the one visiting at the SHC next week is the 2015 Yale PhD, now an Associate Professor at the University of Chicago. From his Chicago website:
I research the hemispheric literatures and cultures of the Americas, principally of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. My inquiries have taken place in the fields of indigenous and Latinx studies; American poetry and poetics; environmental criticism; theory of law; and the intersection of poetry and anthropology; with the following questions focusing my work: How are semiotics and aesthetics an interface for racial and national social locations? And how do those positions — that is, social locations of identity, race, gender, kinship, and ecology — change when cast in the aesthetic forms that one finds in cultural objects on the outside of normative semiotics, troping, and figuration?
In responding to those questions, I focus on the literatures and cultural practices that — for various social reasons — tend not to be taken seriously as literature and culture: the contemporary literature, visual art, legal philosophy, and environmental thinking of non-alphabetical sign systems such as pictographs and khipu; dreams; practices and textual formations of divination; magic. Because my scholarship and creative practices are concerned with the world-bearing qualities of literary works (especially poetics), these inquiries often take place at the intersection of anthropology and literary studies. And my teaching reflects these interests in both content and form: my classes regularly involve strong creative components, in addition to lessons in context, history, and theory.
I find all of this thought-provoking. Just the sort of thing that the SHC — where I was a Fellow in 2005-06 — is there for.
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