Hearing Cuban Voices in a Time of Crisis - Brooke Larson, Ted A. Henken, Flor Barceló (Bildner Center, CUNY)

 

Hearing Cuban Voices  in a Time of Crisis

Tuesday, September 17, 6 PM Skylight Room The Graduate Center, CUNY

The late historian Elizabeth Dore spent the last 20 years directing “Cuban Voices,” a Ford Foundation-sponsored oral history project collecting memories of the Cuban Revolution. In 2023, Duke University Press published her posthumous book, How Things Fall Apart: What Happened to the Cuban Revolution, which tells modern Cuba’s story through the lives of seven islanders from the post-Soviet generation. The 15-year project, which involved a large team of Cuban interviewers and over 100 interviewees, faced many challenges, including difficulty finding a publisher for Dore’s controversial findings. “The ghost of Oscar Lewis kept me awake at night,” she notes wryly in the book’s opening pages. Following Dore’s death in 2022, her children donated the project archive to Columbia University, where it is now digitally available to the public. A lifelong socialist and principled scholar, Dore was dedicated to hearing diverse, critical, and often contradictory Cuban voices describing the Revolution’s challenges, rewards, and dilemmas. Her book captures the voices of those who built, supported, opposed, and even fled the Revolution. This initial panel, the first of three inspired by Dore’s work, will focus on Dore’s personal and political history and intellectual legacy (Brooke Larson), an analysis of How Things Fall Apart (Ted A. Henken), and an introduction to Columbia’s “Cuban Voices” oral history collection by the archivist who prepared it for public access (Flor Barceló).

Brooke Larson is a Professor of History (Emerita) at Stony Brook University, SUNY. She co-founded the Latin American Caribbean Center and has taught a wide range of graduate seminars and undergraduate courses, including Colonial Latin America, Race and Nation, European/Indian Encounters, and Comparative Frontiers. Her research spans five centuries of colonial and modern history, focusing on the Andes. Her latest book, The Lettered Indian. Race, Nation, and the Indigenous Education in 20th-century Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2024), is an ethnographic history exploring the epic battle over indigenous education, its implications for Bolivian nation-building projects, and the contested meanings of race and citizenship throughout the 20th century.

Ted A. Henken (Ph.D., Tulane University) is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Baruch College, CUNY. He has conducted sociological research in Cuba and interviewed numerous Cubans over the past 25 years. Based on this extensive research, he has published several books, articles, and profiles, including Cuba’s Digital Revolution: Citizen Innovation and State Policy(2021, co-edited with Sara García Santamaría) and Entrepreneurial Cuba: The Changing Policy Landscape(2015, co-authored with Archibald Ritter). He is currently working on an oral history of Cuban independent journalism, tentatively titled Saturn’s Children: The 60-Year Struggle to Reestablish a Free Press in Cuba (under contract with the University of Florida Press).

Flor Barceló is a Ph.D. student in Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. They hold a Licenciatura in Letras (BA) from the University of Buenos Aires, where they concentrated on Literary Theory. Since 2015, Flor has worked as a high school teacher and a community college professor. Their research interests include the construction of queer archives, DIY publications (magazines and fanzines) produced by LGBT+ activists from Latin America and Spain, subjectivity and grievable lives under neoliberalism, and literature written during the AIDS epidemics. Flor interned at Columbia’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library during the Summer of 2023, where she processed the interviews that led to Elizabeth Dore’s book How Things Fall Apart.

TO REGISTER, send e-mail bildner@gc.cuny.edu UPDATES: http://www.bildner.org

The Brazilian Amazon, at CUNY - Larry Rohter, Anthony Cak

The Brazilian Amazon: Exploration, Exploitation, Sustainability

Friday, October 25, 4 PM Segal Theatre The Graduate Center, CUNY

Cândido Rondon, a Brazilian military officer and explorer, is considered one of the foremost Brazilian heroes and patriots known for his lifelong support for the indigenous Brazilians. He was the first director of Brazil’s Indian Protection Services (later known at FUNAI) and supported the creation of the Xingu National Park. He spent his life exploring Brazil, including mapping the state of Mata Grosso, advocating for the indigenous peoples, and leading Theodore Roosevelt’s expedition into the Amazon. The Explorers Club of New York nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957.  Larry Rohter's new book trackes Rondon's paths in the Amazon and discusses how and who will arise to safeguard the Brazilian Amazon's future.

Larry Rohter (M.A., Columbia University) served as a correspondent in Rio de Janeiro for fourteen years for Newsweek and later as The New York Times bureau chief. He is widely considered a top expert on Brazil. He is the author of three books about Brazil, the most recent of which is a biography of the explorer, scientist and statesman Cândido Rondon, Rondon : Uma Biografia(Objetiva, 2019).

Anthony D. Cak (Ph.D., Indiana University) is the Associate Director of the Environmental Sciences Initiative at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center. His dissertation focused on the impacts of deforestation and urban development on the water chemistry of small streams in the Brazilian Amazon, in and near the city of Altamira in the state of Pará. Dr. Cak's research interests include ecosystem ecology, stream and river ecology, geospatial technology, data visualizations, and science policy and communication.

Debate na City University of New York : Bolsonaro, for beginners...

Colloquium on Brazilian Democracy Opening Roundtable Brazil under Bolsonaro

Monday, Sept. 16, 2 PM Room 9206 The Graduate Center, CUNY

Robert Kaufman (Ph.D., Harvard University) is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University. He has written widely on authoritarianism and democratic transitions and on the political economy of economic reform. His current research is on the relation between inequality, distributive conflict, and democratization during the “Third Wave.” His most recent book is Dictators and Democrats: Elites, Masses, and Regime Change, co-authored with Stephan Haggard (Princeton University Press, 2016). Other books co-authored with Stephan Haggard include Development, Democracy, and Welfare States: Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe(Princeton University Press, 2008) and The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (Princeton University Press, 1995), winner of the 1995 Luebbert Prize for the best book in comparative politics, awarded by the Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association; Kaufman is co-editor (with Joan M. Nelson) of Crucial Needs, Weak Incentives: Social Sector Reform, Globalization and Democratization in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Roberto Simon is the senior director for policy at Americas Society/Council of the Americas and the politics editor for Americas Quarterly. Previously, Simon served as the lead Latin America analyst at FTI Consulting’s Geopolitical Intelligence practice. He also worked for almost 10 years as a journalist at O Estado de S. Paulo, covering political crises, elections, natural disasters, and conflicts throughout Latin America and in the Middle East. He was a public policy fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC and is currently working on a book about Brazil’s involvement in Chile’s 1973 coup. Simon has a master’s in public policy from Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where he was a Jorge Paulo Lemann fellow, and a master’s in international relations from the University of the State of São Paulo (UNESP).

Jorge Antonio Alves (Ph.D., Brown University) is Associate Professor of Political Science at Queens College, CUNY. His research focuses on subnational politics, political party behavior, intergovernmental relations, and the implementation of public health and social policy in Brazil and Latin America more broadly. His work has been published in journals such as Comparative Politics, Latin American Politics and Society, and the Journal of Politics in Latin America.

Paulo Vieira da Cunha is a Partner and Head of Research at Tandem Global Markets’ Emerging Markets Fund. In 2008, he completed a two-year appointment as Deputy Governor at the Central Bank of Brazil, where he was also a member of the Bank’s Policy Committee. Earlier he held senior positions in the government of the State of São Paulo. He was a researcher at IPEA in Rio de Janeiro where he edited Pesquisa e Planejamento Econômico, and at CEBRAP in São Paulo, in addition to holding the post of Associate Professor of Economics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. In addition to his writings for the market, he has over 50 publications in areas of labour economics, the economics of inflation and macroeconomics in general.

TO REGISTER, send e-mail bildner@gc.cuny.edu

Latin American Literary History: debate at CUNY - February 8, 2018

Americanos, europeus, enfim, pessoas normais, tendem a programar com a "necesaria antelación" seus eventos acadêmicos, como faz agora este programa da City University of New York, para um evento que vai realizar-se apenas no dia 8 de fevereiro de 2018.
Conheço o Roberto González Echevarria, da Yale, a quem já concedi um visto quando no Consulado em Hartford, CT, e tenho o seu livro, generosamente oferecido a mim pelo próprio Roberto, quando me visitou. O seu curso sobre Cervantes está aqui, neste link:
https://oyc.yale.edu/spanish-and-portuguese/span-300
Recomendo, aos que puderem assistir...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Latin American Literary History:

Continuities and Discontinuities

Thursday, February 8, 2018, Room 9206/07

The Graduate Center, CUNY

A discussion with Rolena Adorno and Roberto González Echevarría, authors of the recently published Breve historia de la literatura latinoamericana colonial y moderna (Madrid, 2017). The two parts of the Breve historia are hinged by Andrés Bello, the Venezuelan polymath, and range from Columbus to Bolaño, while devoting attention to authors rarely considered by the general public such as Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Esteban Echeverría, and Severo Sarduy. The discussion will center on how various periods of Latin American literature engage each other and how current literature deals with the past and with literatures in other languages.

Panelists:

Rolena Adorno, Yale University

Roberto González Echevarría, Yale University

Commentators:

Regina Harrison, University of Maryland, College Park

Moderator: Araceli Tinajero, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Rolena Adorno (Ph.D., Cornell University) is Sterling Professor of Spanish at Yale University. Author of Colonial Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction (2011), De Guancane a Macondo: Estudios de literatura latinoamericana (2008), The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative (2007, 2014), Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez, with Patrick Charles Pautz (1999), and Guaman Poma Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru (1986, 2000). She is a member of the National Council on the Humanities of the NEH, an Honorary Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2015 Adorno received the Modern Language Association’s Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement.

Roberto González Echevarría (Ph.D., Yale) is the Sterling Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literature at Yale. Ph.D.Yale, 1970, and among honorary doctorates one from Columbia in 2002. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. President Barack Obama bestowed on González Echevarría the National Humanities Medal in 2010. His Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative won awards from the MLA and LASA and I son its sixth edition. He was awarded in 2014 the National Prize for Criticism by the Instituto Cubano del Libro for Lecturas y relecturas. In 2002 Fondo de Cultura published Crítica práctica/Práctica, and in 2005 Yale Press published Love and the Law in Cervantes. In 2014 the University of Minas Gerais issued Monstros e archivos, while in 2016 Yale Press brought out his edition of Cervantes' Exemplary Novels, translated by Edie Grossman. He has written for The New York Times Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, and The Nation. González Echevarría's twenty-four lecture course on Cervantes’s Don Quijote is available through Yale Open Courses. His work has appeared in Spanish, English, French, German, Portuguese, Polish, Italian, Persian, and soon Chinese.

Regina Harrison (Ph.D., University of Illinois) is Professor Emerita of Spanish and Comparative Literatures, University of Maryland, College Park. Her scholarship combines the disciplines of literary studies and anthropology. She is author of Signs, Songs, and Memory in the Andes: Translating Quechua Language and Culture (University of Texas, 1989), which won the Modern Language Association’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, and Entre el tronar épico y el llanto elegíaco (Quito, Ecuador; 1997). Her book Sin and Confession in Colonial Peru (University of Texas Press, 2014) was awarded the Bainton Prize in History from the Sixteenth-Century Society, and her DVD, Mined to Death, filmed with Quechua-speaker miners in Bolivia, was awarded LASA’s “Award of Merit in Film.”

Araceli Tinajero (Ph.D., Rutgers University) is Professor of Spanish at The Graduate Center and City College of New York, CUNY. She is the author of Orientalismo en el modernismo hispanoamericano, El lector de tabaquería (Eng. El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader), and Kokoro, una mexicana en Japón. Professor Tinajero is the editor of Cultura y letras cubanas en el siglo XXI, Exilio y cosmopolitismo en el arte y la literatura hispánica, and Orientalisms of the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian World. 

Brazil Post-electoral political situation - David Fleischer (City University of New York)

 

Brazil's New Political Dynamics

The October 2016 Municipal Elections
Date: Thursday, November 10, 2016
Time: 4:15 - 6:15 PM
Room: C201/202 (The Graduate Center, CUNY)

Consequences of Brazil’s 2016 Municipal Elections
David Fleischer, University of Brasilia

The 2016 Municipal Elections and the Future of the PT: Insights from the Northeast
Jorge Alves, Queens College

Moderator/Discussant: Mauricio Font, Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies

Brazil’s just-concluded municipal elections (October 2016) came at a critical moment in national politics and may help reshape the country's political dynamics. This was a festival of democracy: over 144 million eligible voters from more than 30 parties were called upon to elect mayors ('prefeitos') and city councilmen ('vereadores') in 5,568 municípios (cities) in the 26 Brazilian states. As a rule, Brazilian parties that elect more mayors, elect more deputies two years later and vice-versa. If so, a key question is whether the winning political leaders, parties, and alignments of 2016 may affect the elections for president, congress, governors, and state legislatures in the 2018 elections.
Dramatically, the Workers' Party (PT) and its allies fared rather badly in the final tally, while the PSDB, PMDB, and PRB had important victories. Precisely how will these results impact post-impeachment dynamics? Our panelists will analyze final election results. They will explore the extent to which and how this election may redefine the balance of political forces, put new leaders in the limelight, and help bring about a new model.

David Fleischer (Ph.D., University of Florida) joined the faculty of the University of Brasilia (UnB) in 1972. There he was Chair of the Department of Political Science and International Relations (1985-1989) and member of the University Council (1985-1993). He was Director of the School of Social and Political Science at UniDF - Centro Universitário do Distrito Federal. Fleischer has published widely on Brazilian politics (Congress, elections, political parties, and political corruption), and North-South Relations. His more recent publications are: "Government and Politics" in Brazil: A Country Study (1998); Corruption in Brazil (2002); "Political Reforms: Cardoso's Missing Link" in Reforming Brazil (2004); "Brazil: From Military Regime to a Workers' Party Government" in Latin America: Its Problems and its Promises (2010); "Brazil" in Freedom House, Countries at the Crossroads - An Analysis of Democratic Governance (2010); and "Political Reform: A Never-Ending Story" in The Brazilian State: Debate and Agenda (2011). Currently, Fleischer serves on the advisory board of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Brazil as well as on the board of the Brazil Studies Program at Harvard University.

Jorge Alves is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at Queens College. He specializes in comparative politics, specifically on issues of federalism, intergovernmental relations, state capacity construction and the political economy of development, with a regional focus on Latin America and Brazil. He is currently working on two research projects: the effect of local configurations of political competition on the construction of subnational healthcare institutions (the subject of his dissertation), and the politics behind public transparency advances.

Mauricio Font (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is director of the Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies and Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center and Queens College, City University of New York. Font's most recent publication is The State and the Private Sector in Latin America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). He is an author and co-author of numerous publications on Brazil, including Coffee and Transformation in São Paulo, Brazil (Lexington Books, 2010), Transforming Brazil: A Reform Era in Perspective (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), The Brazilian State: Debate and Agenda (Lexington Books 2011), Reforming Brazil (Lexington Books/Bildner Western Hemisphere Series, 2004), and Charting a New Course: The Politics of Globalization and Social Transformation (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).
TO REGISTER send e-mail to brazilproject@gc.cuny.edu