Event Description
The Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Center for Latin American Studies present “Queer Colombian Literature Beyond Borders,” a conversation about the impact of migration on Latinx queer life. Giuseppe Caputo, Jaime Manrique and Julián Delgado are three award-winning Colombian writers spanning three generations who have published in Spanish, English or both languages simultaneously. Marked by the experience of migration to the United States and writing from a place between mastery in one language and clumsiness in a new one, this group of writers has produced some of the most important pieces of Colombian LGBT-Queer literature in the last three decades. The Colombian diaspora is not a frequent topic in academic debates, much less the Colombian queer diaspora. Yet just as national borders codify the social and natural body, genders are deployed to define, confine, and segment human bodies as well. What do genders and borders have in common? How does queerness switch between and across borders?
The writers will engage in conversation with Juana Silva, UK-based Colombian translator of Fiebre Tropical, and Alejandro Múnera, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
Speakers
Giuseppe Caputo is a Colombian writer who studied creative writing at New York University and the University of Iowa, where he specialized in queer and gender studies. Un mundo huérfano was his first novel, translated into English as An Orphan World by Juana Adcock and Sophie Hughes, for which he received an English Penn Award in 2018.
Jaime Manrique Ardila, a bilingual writer born in Barranquilla, Colombia, was awarded Colombia’s “Eduardo Cote Lamus” National Poetry Award for his debut poetry collection, Los adoradores de la luna (1977). He is the author of several books of poetry, including El libro de los muertos and My Night with/Mi noche con Federico García Lorca. Manrique has also published several novels, including Our Lives Are the Rivers (winner of the 2007 International Latino Book Award in historical fiction) and Latin Moon in Manhattan, as well as the well-known essay collection Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me.
Julián Delgado Lopera is an award-winning Colombian writer based in San Francisco. They are the author of the New York Times-acclaimed novel Fiebre Tropical from The Feminist Press. Delgado is also the author of Quiéreme (Nomadic Press, 2017) and ¡Cuéntamelo! (Aunt Lute, 2017), an illustrated bilingual collection of oral histories by LGBT Latinx immigrants, which won a 2018 Lambda Literary Award and a 2018 Independent Publisher Book Award.
Juana Silva is a translator and cultural manager. She holds degrees in Modern Languages (2014) and Literary Studies (2015) from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. In 2016 she completed a M.A. in Translation and Literature at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom. Fiebre Tropical by Julián Delgado Lopera is her first translated novel.
Alejandro Múnera is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. His work focuses on modern and contemporary aesthetics and critical thought in Spanish America, Brazil, and the Caribbean. He is currently working on his dissertation project, “Vital Signs: Queer Art Practices in Latin America,” which studies the micropolitical and aesthetic trajectory of deviant desires in late twentieth-century ephemeral press, literature, documentary cinema, activism, and the visual arts. His poetry has appeared in literary magazines and was anthologized recently in Como la flor: voces de la poesía queer colombiana contemporánea (Planeta).
Cosponsors
Cosponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.