Description:

Please join ACH and LACS in welcoming Tara Daly of Marquette University.  She will present her research on Bartolina Sisa.  Lunch will be served at the event.

Bartolina Sisa was an Aymara indigenous woman who led an army of 40,000 against the Spanish crown before she was publicly executed in La Paz in 1782. Artists and activists consistently invoke Sisa at times of collective crisis caused by both the extractive industries and the dumping of waste products in the Andes. Dr. Daly will present a 19th-century painting, a 20th-century film, and a 21st-century performance to posit that Sisa’s artistic repetitions challenge the western emphasis on the historical archive as the basis for knowledge. She will discuss Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s concept of ch’ixi as a means to center the contradictions and overlaps between western and non-western knowledge systems that foreground our ability to know Bartolina Sisa and her cultural doubles.

Tara Daly specializes in contemporary Latin American literary and visual cultures, primarily in the Andes region. Her first book, Beyond Human: Vital Materialisms in the Andean Avant-Gardes (Bucknell 2019) studied the ways that artists animate natural materials to challenge the notion that the human is the privileged agent over a passive ecosystem.