We are incredibly excited to invite you to the last materia event of the year, a talk by Professor Ingrid Brioso Rieumont (Princeton University). 

Abstract:

In this talk, cognate to her book in progress, Dr. Brioso Rieumont explores slavery as a formation that extends beyond the limits of life. Organized as two meditations—on the body of the enslaver and the body of the enslaved—it situates these figures as sites of the temporal and material extensions of slavery. The first movement turns to metaphysical and legal considerations of the unborn through debates surrounding gradual emancipation and the 1871 Free Womb Law in Brazil. The second turns to the remains of the formerly enslaved, tracing economic arguments shaped by the illegal slave trade and high mortality rates in nineteenth-century Cuba. In dialogue with two masterpieces of Latin American literature—Machado de Assis’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881) and Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés or El Ángel Hill (1882)—she analyzes how literary form registers an edge where legal and economic regimes fail.

Our Speaker: 

Ingrid Brioso Rieumont (Ph.D., Princeton University) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Dartmouth College, working at the intersection of transatlantic slavery, literary criticism, and philosophy, with a focus on the Hispanophone Caribbean and Brazil. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Latin American Research Review, Latin American Literary Review, Cuban Studies, Revista Casa de las Américas, and Revista Brasileira de Literatura Comparada.

RSVP for the Bioso Rieumont talk