Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Ecopoetics Series

September 26 – October 30, 2024

This series is part of the new Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown (CEHAB) that aims to highlight the expressive poetic arts and their relationship with the land, sea, and earthly matters of co- and sustained existence.

For more information about CEHAB, please contact its inaugural director Macarena Gómez-Barris at macarena_gomez-barris@brown.edu.

Schedule

Details

In line with other recent Indigenous cultural production from Brazil, which emphasizes the importance of non-human subjects for the understanding of collectivity and ancestral belonging, this lecture by Lúcia Sá (University of Manchester, UK) will focus on the role of rivers and stones in written and visual works by Ezequiel Vitor Tuxá and Gustavo Caboco.

Lúcia Sá is Professor of Brazilian Studies at the University of Manchester, UK. She is the author of Life in the Megalopolis: Mexico City and São Paulo (Routledge, 2007), Rainforest Literatures: Amazonian Texts and Latin American Cultures (Minnesota University Press, 2004), and many articles on Brazilian and Latin American literature, cinema, and visual art. She was principal researcher on the Arts and Humanities Research Network (AHRC) project “Racism and Anti-racism in Brazil: The Case of Indigenous Peoples” and led the Brazil strand of the project "Cultures of Anti-Racism in Brazil: The Case of Indigenous Peoples," also funded by the AHRC. She is from São Paulo.

Presented by the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, cosponsored by the Brazil Initiative in the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

This panel is convened and moderated by Macarena Gómez-Barris.

Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante is C.B. Smith, Sr. Centennial Chair in United States-Mexico Relations #3 Associate Professor at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of Indigenous Interferences: Acoustic Colonialism and Mapuche Response (Duke University Press, forthcoming) and Tramas del mercado: imaginación económica, cultura pública y literatura en el Chile de fines del siglo veinte (Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2007) and coeditor (with Alvaro Fernández-Bravo and Alejandra Laera) of El valor de la cultura: arte, literatura y mercado en América Latina (Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2007). He belongs to the Mapuche people and grew up in Tralcao, a rural village in the river region of Valdivia in southern Chile. He is a founding member of the Comunidad de Historia Mapuche (CHM), which is a collective of Indigenous, Mapuche researchers based in Temuco, southern Chile.

dg nanouk okpik is the author of the poetry collections Blood Snow (Wave Books, 2022), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Corpse Whale (University of Arizona Press, 2012), which won the American Book Award. She is also a recipient of the Truman Capote Literary Award, the May Sarton Award, and the Windham Campbell Prize. She is from Barrow, Alaska, and is Iñupiaq, Inuit. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Part of the Elemental Media Conference and Brown Arts’ IGNITE Series. Presented by the Elemental Media Lab in the Department of Modern Culture and Media.

Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, activist, and filmmaker whose work addresses pressing concerns of the modern world, including ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. Born and raised in Santiago de Chile, she has been in exile since the early 1970s, after the military coup against the president Salvador Allende. In London, she was a cofounder of Artists for Democracy in l974. She coined the term “Arte Precario” in the mid-1960s in Chile, as a new independent and non-colonized category for her precarious works composed of debris, structures that disappear in the landscape, which include her quipus (“knots” in Quechua), envisioned as poems in space. She has reinvented the ancient Pre-Columbian quipu system of non-writing with knots through ritual acts that weave the urban landscape, rivers and oceans, as well as people, to reconstruct a sense of unity and awareness of interconnectivity. These works bridge art and poetry as a way of “hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard.”

Presented by the Department of Literary Arts. Curated by Eleni Sikelianos.

Phoebe Giannisi, one of the foremost contemporary Greek poets, is a professor in the Department of Architecture of the University of Thessaly. She is the author of eight books of poetry, two of which have appeared in English with New Directions Press, while a third, Homerica (World Poetry Books, 2017) was selected by Anne Carson as a favorite book of 2017. Her work in the field of Ecopoetics transverses the borders between various media, investigating the poetics of voice, body, and place through writing, performances, video and sound-works, and poetic installations.

Presented by the Department of Literary Arts and the Modern Greek Studies Program. Curated by Eleni Sikelianos.