When:
Thursday, February 13, 2025
12:30 PM - 2:00 PM CT
Where: Kresge Hall, 1515, 1880 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208 map it
Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students
Contact:
Spanish and Portuguese
(847) 491-8249
spanish-portuguese@northwestern.edu
Group: Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Sponsor: Program in Science in Human Culture, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, GAMS
Co-Sponsor:
Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Category: Academic, Fine Arts, Lectures & Meetings, Multicultural & Diversity
Professor Jorge Quintana of Dartmouth College will present his new book, "Biocosmism Vitality and the Utopian Imagination in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Vanderbilt, 2024).
"Most scholars study postrevolutionary Mexico as a period in which cultural production significantly shaped national identity through murals, novels, essays, and other artifacts that registered the changing political and social realities in the wake of the Revolution. In Biocosmism, Jorge Quintana Navarrete shifts the focus to examine how a group of scientists, artists, and philosophers conceived the manifold relations of the human species with nonhuman entities (animals, plants, inorganic matter, and celestial bodies, among others). Drawing from recent theoretical trends in new materialisms, biopolitics, and posthumanism, this book traces for the first time, the intellectual constellation of biocosmism or biocosmic thought: the study of universal life understood as the vital vibrancy that animates everything in the cosmos from inorganic matter to living organisms to outer space. It combines both analysis of unexplored areas, such as Alfonso L. Herrera's plasmogeny, and innovative readings of canonical texts like Vasconcelos's La raza cósmica, to examine how biocosmism produced a wide array of utopian projects and theorizations that continue to challenge anthropocentric, biopolitical frameworks." (Vanderbilt UP)