Description:

Cosmopolitanism and Inhospitality: Voluntarism and Melancholia in the Art and Literature of Migration Crises

A lecture by Professor Mariano Siskind (Harvard)

Description: 
This talk will reflect upon the ways in which contemporary literature and art represent their own historical function (their political agency and their sense of impotence) in relation to the closure of the cosmopolitan ethical imagination in public discourse that, in the past, used to function as the condition of possibility for a politics of hospitality. Today, in the context of the most recent migration crises, hospitality has been relegated to the remote corner where literature and the critical and theoretical humanities attempt (and fail) to re-mobilize this and other utopian signifiers.

Mariano Siskind is a Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is the author of Cosmopolitan Desires. Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America (2014), Rumo a um cosmopolitismo da perda. Ensaio sobre o fim do mundo (2020) and The Modernist Songbook. Standards y variaciones sobre formas muertas (2021). He has edited Homi Bhabha's Nuevas minorías, nuevos derechos (2013) and has co-edited with Sylvia Molloy Poéticas de la distancia. Adentro y afuera de la literatura argentina (2006); with Gesine Müller, World Literature, Cosmopolitanism, Globality: Beyond, Against, Post, Otherwise (2019); and with Guillermina De Ferrari, The Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Latin American Literature and Culture (2022). In 2023 he will publish the collection of essays, Dislocaciones y fin de eso que ya no es mundo, and is working on another one, tentatively titled About the End of the World: The Demise of Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary Culture.

June 1, 2022

12pm Graduate Workshop* // CLS seminar room, Kresge 5-531
*For information about the workshop, contact: mauriciooportus2023@u.northwestern.edu

4pm Lecture // McCormick Foundation Center, room 3107