Description:

EVENT WILL BE POSTPONED TO WINTER OR SPRING 2020. 

“Romantic Exile and the Roots of Transnational Celebrity Culture”

A Talk by Omar F. Miranda (Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of San Francisco)

Abstract: The media touted this year’s Academy Awards as one of the most ethnically and racially diverse Oscars ceremonies in recent Hollywood history. Unbeknownst to the many viewers of the event is that the industry of celebrity culture itself sprang into existence in the early nineteenth century as a culturally diverse phenomenon. In this talk, Professor Miranda explores the lives and writings of South-American, French-Swiss, and British literary celebrities — Francisco de Miranda, Germain de Stael, and Lord Byron — to examine the cross-cultural origins of public fascination with individual personality. He will also discuss how this phenomenon was built on conceptions and experiences of exile and counter-colonial movements that resisted contemporary efforts to consolidate the nation-state.

Provincializing Romanticism is a yearlong series of talks and workshop events bringing comparative scholars of global romanticism from within and beyond the Chicago area to Northwestern. The series looks at the cross-cultural exchanges, appropriations, and transformations that have shaped Eurocentric canons of capital-R Romanticism. We welcome faculty and graduate students interested in discussing literary, aesthetic, and historical itineraries of “the” romantic tradition in understudied contexts.

This series of Northwestern events is sponsored by Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, The Graduate School; the Departments of Spanish and Portuguese, French and Italian, German; and Programs in Critical Theory, Comparative Literary Studies, and Middle East and North African Studies.