Description:

Lunch will be served at this book talk by Mauricio Tenorio (University of Chicago, History).

Movements such as Black Lives Matter have demanded symbolic reparations that often involve removing or demolishing statues of characters and events heroized by a single version of the facts. However, as Mauricio Tenorio invites us to recognize, the rise and fall of monuments is as old as history itself. The real novelty lies in the brand new monument of our era: the selfie, the image that, thanks to the magic of social networks, aims to freeze the gesture of destruction as a monumental act that honors true justice and definitive progress.  Mauricio Tenorio proposes seeking refuge in irony to illuminate, with a good dose of self-criticism, the possibility of a relationship with history that allows us to reckon with what is politically uncomfortable, looking at it face to face.  By rethinking our uses of historical discourse and public space, and, above all, demystifying their powers, perhaps we can offer our generation and those to come something more than ruins.