To honor “Lydia Okumura: Situations,” the career-spanning exhibit at the UB Art Galleries of Japanese-Brazilian artist Lydia Okumura, LELACS (the Lake Erie Latin American Cultural Studies consortium) will convene a day-long symposium of new scholarship in Latin American cultural studies. These talks question boundaries between abstraction and concrete reality, writing and visuality, thought and matter, in keeping with Okumura’s art.

This event is free and open to the public.

9:30-10:00am – Opening Remarks

Justin Read, University at Buffalo

10:00am-12:30pm – Session 1

Adam Joseph Shellhorse
Temple University
“Anti-Literature and the Limit: Writing and Subversion in David Viñas”

Luiza Moreira
Binghamton University
“Borges’ ‘Pátio’: A Poem Manuel Bandeira Wished He’d Written”

Gregory Przybyla
University at Buffalo
“De-essentializing the City: Roberto Arlt’s Non-mythical Refoundation of Buenos Aires”

12:30-2:00pm

LELACS Business meeting

2:00-4:00pm – Session 2

Rosario Hubert
Trinity College, Hartford, CT
“Mutations of the Land:  Haruo Ohara’s Scenes of Japanese Life in Southern Brazil”

Fernanda Negrete
University at Buffalo
“Creation and the Clinic According to Lygia Clark”

Sponsored by: UB Humanities Institute, UB Art Galleries, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Department of Comparative Literature, and Professor David E. Johnson