Pedro García-Caro
Trained in Spain, the UK, and the US, I work on Comparative Literatures of the Americas with a concentration on transnational, post-colonial, and neo-colonial cultural production. The critical methodologies of my research engage the combined humanistic traditions of textual analysis, cultural history, literary criticism and theory, with socio-political conceptualizations of nation and nature. I am particularly drawn towards historically-placed, materialist readings of aesthetic practices as an effective means to engage the prevailing onslaught on the humanities by the agents of academic bureaucratization and corporatization.
My early research focused on the critical relations between nationalist narratives and the discourses of progress and modernity as seen by intellectuals and writers in Latin America and the US. Out of that research emerged my first monograph After the Nation: Postnational Satire in the Works of Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2014) which theorizes the emergence of a hemispheric “new leftist” sphere of anti-nationalist literary encodements during the Cold War and beyond. I interrogate the role of these canonical authors whose works sit squarely in the center of their respective national literary systems despite the fact that their Postnational satires engage in an in-depth questioning of official histories, epic narratives, and the grand discourses of national identity.
Discussions of Hispanidad, Mexicanidad, and Americanness are an important part of my syllabi and scholarly production. I have published a number of articles on the ways in which Spanish writers portrayed Latin American nationalisms after independence (from the early 19th Century to the 1930s). As a scholar with Transatlantic interests, I am a co-editor with Sebastiaan Faber (Oberlin College), Cecilia Enjuto Rangel (University of Oregon), and Robert Newcomb (UC Davis) of the volume Transatlantic Studies: Iberia, Latin America, Africa currently under contract with Liverpool University Press. This volume will offer a new paradigm for open discussions about the configuration of traditional fields and departmental divisions challenging national and linguistic biases in the study of transnational cultural relations in the Atlantic basin.
Literary, visual, and intellectual debates about mining and extractivism in the Americas conform the center of my current book project. I delve into the archives of the lettered city and its often ambivalent relation with extractive industries throughout the post-colonial period. Seeking to unearth the records of these debates from the time of independence into the present era, I engage a diversity of themes such as the contradictory and embattled figure of the miner as both victim of social exploitation and agent of ecological destruction; the different utopian horizons of anarchist, liberal-capitalist, and socialist writers and political theorists; and the early constitution of an eco-critical cultural resistance to unsustainable extractivist practices in the hemisphere.
As a result of my research into the debates over mining in the period of Mexican independence (1810-1821), I have identified a number of key voices and cultural agents who allow me to situate mining at the center of the letrado debates about political dependency and emancipation. One such voice is the liberal-leaning autonomist scientist and poet Fermín de Reygadas (1754-1824?) who actively participated in these debates with an abundance of pamphlets and a direct engagement with well-known figures such as Andrés Quintana Roo (1787-1851). My exploration into this early archive has already resulted in a critical, annotated edition of the first Spanish-language play performed in colonial California, Astucias por heredar un sobrino a un tío, by Fermín de Reygadas (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2018. Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage), this is a neoclassical play, censored in Mexico City in 1790 and smuggled and performed in Alta California shortly after. A series of contemporary adaptations and performances of this play demonstrates its relevance for a modern Latino audience in the US.
Phone: +541-513-8706
Address: Friendly Hall, 407
University of Oregon
Eugene, 97403-1233
My early research focused on the critical relations between nationalist narratives and the discourses of progress and modernity as seen by intellectuals and writers in Latin America and the US. Out of that research emerged my first monograph After the Nation: Postnational Satire in the Works of Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2014) which theorizes the emergence of a hemispheric “new leftist” sphere of anti-nationalist literary encodements during the Cold War and beyond. I interrogate the role of these canonical authors whose works sit squarely in the center of their respective national literary systems despite the fact that their Postnational satires engage in an in-depth questioning of official histories, epic narratives, and the grand discourses of national identity.
Discussions of Hispanidad, Mexicanidad, and Americanness are an important part of my syllabi and scholarly production. I have published a number of articles on the ways in which Spanish writers portrayed Latin American nationalisms after independence (from the early 19th Century to the 1930s). As a scholar with Transatlantic interests, I am a co-editor with Sebastiaan Faber (Oberlin College), Cecilia Enjuto Rangel (University of Oregon), and Robert Newcomb (UC Davis) of the volume Transatlantic Studies: Iberia, Latin America, Africa currently under contract with Liverpool University Press. This volume will offer a new paradigm for open discussions about the configuration of traditional fields and departmental divisions challenging national and linguistic biases in the study of transnational cultural relations in the Atlantic basin.
Literary, visual, and intellectual debates about mining and extractivism in the Americas conform the center of my current book project. I delve into the archives of the lettered city and its often ambivalent relation with extractive industries throughout the post-colonial period. Seeking to unearth the records of these debates from the time of independence into the present era, I engage a diversity of themes such as the contradictory and embattled figure of the miner as both victim of social exploitation and agent of ecological destruction; the different utopian horizons of anarchist, liberal-capitalist, and socialist writers and political theorists; and the early constitution of an eco-critical cultural resistance to unsustainable extractivist practices in the hemisphere.
As a result of my research into the debates over mining in the period of Mexican independence (1810-1821), I have identified a number of key voices and cultural agents who allow me to situate mining at the center of the letrado debates about political dependency and emancipation. One such voice is the liberal-leaning autonomist scientist and poet Fermín de Reygadas (1754-1824?) who actively participated in these debates with an abundance of pamphlets and a direct engagement with well-known figures such as Andrés Quintana Roo (1787-1851). My exploration into this early archive has already resulted in a critical, annotated edition of the first Spanish-language play performed in colonial California, Astucias por heredar un sobrino a un tío, by Fermín de Reygadas (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2018. Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage), this is a neoclassical play, censored in Mexico City in 1790 and smuggled and performed in Alta California shortly after. A series of contemporary adaptations and performances of this play demonstrates its relevance for a modern Latino audience in the US.
Phone: +541-513-8706
Address: Friendly Hall, 407
University of Oregon
Eugene, 97403-1233
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Books by Pedro García-Caro
the field of Iberian and Latin American Transatlantic Studies with three
goals in mind: to discuss its function within our pedagogical practices, to lay out its research methodologies, and to explain its theoretical underpinnings. One central aim of Transatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia, and Africa is to make the case for an understanding of transatlantic cultural history over the last two centuries that transcends national and linguistic boundaries, as well as traditional academic configurations, focusing instead on the continuities and fractures between Latin America, the Iberian Peninsula, and Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Africa.
Transatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia, and Africa emerges from, and performs, an ongoing debate concerning the role of transatlantic approaches in the fields of Iberian, Latin American, African, and Luso-Brazilian studies. The innovative research and discussions contained in this volume’s 35 essays by leading scholars in the field reframe the intertwined cultural histories of the diverse transnational spaces encompassed by the former Spanish and Portuguese empires. An emerging field, Transatlantic Studies seeks to provoke a discussion and a reconfiguration of the traditional academic notions of area studies, while critically engaging the concepts of national cultures and postcolonial relations among Spain, Portugal and their former colonies. Crucially, Transatlantic Studies transgresses national boundaries without dehistoricizing or decontextualizing the texts it seeks to incorporate within this new framework.
From the book-cover:
“After the Nation is an extraordinarily rich book that encompasses more than literary criticism—the cultural history of divergent nations that cannot or should not be ignorant of each other’s culture nor of its dissident voices.”—Jean Franco, from the foreword
“Exemplary in its inter-American scope, well-conceived and clearly written, this book offers an innovative framework to investigate a wide array of interrelated American topics—border crossing, modernity, enlightenment, postcolonalism, exceptionalism—that have shaped the works of Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon and, by extension, of many contemporary U.S. and Latin American writers.”—Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Michigan and author of The Censorship Files: Latin American Writers and Franco’s Spain
This important book project will further our understanding of the Hispanic cultural heritage on the Pacific rim of the US, and will also contribute to the growing corpus of recovered literary texts from the Hispanic and Mexican period that preceded the annexation of many territories to the US. In 1796 a diverse group of families made up of veteran Catalan soldiers and Mexican prisoners was offered the chance to settle near the San Lorenzo River across the Franciscan Mission of Santa Cruz in what is today Eastern Santa Cruz. They were intent on creating Branciforte, a villa of the Enlightenment: a small agricultural township that entered into immediate competition with the alternate model of colonization represented by the neighboring feudal Misión Santa Cruz across the river. Both settlements constituted the basis for modern-day Santa Cruz in California. As the settlers naturally brought with them the artifacts and practices of daily life –including entertainment in the form of musical instruments, gambling games, and books– this play was one of the cultural products brought along and, according to archival evidence, also performed. And yet, the now obvious connection between this long-forgotten early Hispanic manuscript comedy and this community has not been traced before. The play has never appeared in print before nor has it been performed in the last two hundred years. "
From the Introduction: Feverish Transits (by Pedro García-Caro)
The Fever seeks to subvert the complacent conscience of the globalized traveling Westerner/American sitting in the audience through a long-established process of empathy and identification, which is, however, devoid of either classical catharsis or a consensus-building, feel-good resolution. Instead, The Fever is an essay-monologue which seeks to contaminate the reader-spectator with that exotic ethical fever the traveler has picked up in a foreign country. As such, it is an infectious text, reader beware.
Para el personaje de La fiebre los contrastes entre el norte global —los placeres individuales de la clase media intelectual y de una vida agradable dedicada al conocimiento— no hacen sino remachar la existencia empobrecida y abandonada de las masas humanas que el viajero encuentra a lo largo y ancho del sur global. El sentimiento de culpa del viajero privilegiado concentra el discurso agónico de este estadounidense que se ha aventurado hacia el sur. En este encuentro entre norte y sur globales, la seguridad y las certidumbres de fronteras y abundancias se derrumban; el estado dedicado a proteger a los pocos privilegiados del planeta —el 1% que machaca y exprime al otro 99%, tanto en casa como fuera de ella— parece haberse esfumado. Mientras se hunde en el suelo de un baño de hotel tercermundista, en "un país pobre donde no hablan mi idioma", el viajero experimenta un tránsito febril: el viaje desde un punto de la red de conexiones aéreas transnacionales y de franquicias hoteleras se ha descarrilado con la irrupción de esta fiebre ética.
La fiebre busca trastornar las conciencias complacientes de los espectadores americanos (y europeos) a través de un proceso bien conocido de empatía e identificación, que sin embargo carece de momento catártico, no busca el consenso o la sensación de bienestar entre su público. Al contrario, este monólogo-ensayo pretende contaminar al espectador-lector con la misma fiebre exótica que ya ha infectado al viajero en algún país extranjero. Así pues, pongan atención, lectores: se trata de un texto infeccioso.""
Book Chapters by Pedro García-Caro
history of the colonization of the North American continent by evoking a
fragmented narrative of cultural encounters. In this narrative, Hispanic
colonizers and a diversity of indigenous peoples engaged in the tense
production of mutual knowledge through corporal performance art ranging
from military spectacle to religious acts to pantomime and drama. This
framing of Hispanic/Latina/o culture in the colonial period and beyond as
performed to a captive audience, for a public incarcerated within the matrix
of colonial power, seated within the confines of the Western episteme and
defined as a passive spectator in need of cultural and religious conversion,
allows me to critically reflect on the ethos of performance and the archives of the public stage to further disclose this literature’s foundational epistemic violence. While the scattered archival records of over 300 years of settlement and contact highlight the wide use of music, dance, and drama, as tools for the theatricalization of the colonial regime, the records also confirm these arts’ relevance as a precious space for cultural survival and resistance for the colonized.
Articles by Pedro García-Caro
Keywords: Neoclassical drama, colonial Spanish California, border theater, Fer- mín de Reygadas, recovered literature, censorship.
the field of Iberian and Latin American Transatlantic Studies with three
goals in mind: to discuss its function within our pedagogical practices, to lay out its research methodologies, and to explain its theoretical underpinnings. One central aim of Transatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia, and Africa is to make the case for an understanding of transatlantic cultural history over the last two centuries that transcends national and linguistic boundaries, as well as traditional academic configurations, focusing instead on the continuities and fractures between Latin America, the Iberian Peninsula, and Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Africa.
Transatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia, and Africa emerges from, and performs, an ongoing debate concerning the role of transatlantic approaches in the fields of Iberian, Latin American, African, and Luso-Brazilian studies. The innovative research and discussions contained in this volume’s 35 essays by leading scholars in the field reframe the intertwined cultural histories of the diverse transnational spaces encompassed by the former Spanish and Portuguese empires. An emerging field, Transatlantic Studies seeks to provoke a discussion and a reconfiguration of the traditional academic notions of area studies, while critically engaging the concepts of national cultures and postcolonial relations among Spain, Portugal and their former colonies. Crucially, Transatlantic Studies transgresses national boundaries without dehistoricizing or decontextualizing the texts it seeks to incorporate within this new framework.
From the book-cover:
“After the Nation is an extraordinarily rich book that encompasses more than literary criticism—the cultural history of divergent nations that cannot or should not be ignorant of each other’s culture nor of its dissident voices.”—Jean Franco, from the foreword
“Exemplary in its inter-American scope, well-conceived and clearly written, this book offers an innovative framework to investigate a wide array of interrelated American topics—border crossing, modernity, enlightenment, postcolonalism, exceptionalism—that have shaped the works of Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon and, by extension, of many contemporary U.S. and Latin American writers.”—Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Michigan and author of The Censorship Files: Latin American Writers and Franco’s Spain
This important book project will further our understanding of the Hispanic cultural heritage on the Pacific rim of the US, and will also contribute to the growing corpus of recovered literary texts from the Hispanic and Mexican period that preceded the annexation of many territories to the US. In 1796 a diverse group of families made up of veteran Catalan soldiers and Mexican prisoners was offered the chance to settle near the San Lorenzo River across the Franciscan Mission of Santa Cruz in what is today Eastern Santa Cruz. They were intent on creating Branciforte, a villa of the Enlightenment: a small agricultural township that entered into immediate competition with the alternate model of colonization represented by the neighboring feudal Misión Santa Cruz across the river. Both settlements constituted the basis for modern-day Santa Cruz in California. As the settlers naturally brought with them the artifacts and practices of daily life –including entertainment in the form of musical instruments, gambling games, and books– this play was one of the cultural products brought along and, according to archival evidence, also performed. And yet, the now obvious connection between this long-forgotten early Hispanic manuscript comedy and this community has not been traced before. The play has never appeared in print before nor has it been performed in the last two hundred years. "
From the Introduction: Feverish Transits (by Pedro García-Caro)
The Fever seeks to subvert the complacent conscience of the globalized traveling Westerner/American sitting in the audience through a long-established process of empathy and identification, which is, however, devoid of either classical catharsis or a consensus-building, feel-good resolution. Instead, The Fever is an essay-monologue which seeks to contaminate the reader-spectator with that exotic ethical fever the traveler has picked up in a foreign country. As such, it is an infectious text, reader beware.
Para el personaje de La fiebre los contrastes entre el norte global —los placeres individuales de la clase media intelectual y de una vida agradable dedicada al conocimiento— no hacen sino remachar la existencia empobrecida y abandonada de las masas humanas que el viajero encuentra a lo largo y ancho del sur global. El sentimiento de culpa del viajero privilegiado concentra el discurso agónico de este estadounidense que se ha aventurado hacia el sur. En este encuentro entre norte y sur globales, la seguridad y las certidumbres de fronteras y abundancias se derrumban; el estado dedicado a proteger a los pocos privilegiados del planeta —el 1% que machaca y exprime al otro 99%, tanto en casa como fuera de ella— parece haberse esfumado. Mientras se hunde en el suelo de un baño de hotel tercermundista, en "un país pobre donde no hablan mi idioma", el viajero experimenta un tránsito febril: el viaje desde un punto de la red de conexiones aéreas transnacionales y de franquicias hoteleras se ha descarrilado con la irrupción de esta fiebre ética.
La fiebre busca trastornar las conciencias complacientes de los espectadores americanos (y europeos) a través de un proceso bien conocido de empatía e identificación, que sin embargo carece de momento catártico, no busca el consenso o la sensación de bienestar entre su público. Al contrario, este monólogo-ensayo pretende contaminar al espectador-lector con la misma fiebre exótica que ya ha infectado al viajero en algún país extranjero. Así pues, pongan atención, lectores: se trata de un texto infeccioso.""
history of the colonization of the North American continent by evoking a
fragmented narrative of cultural encounters. In this narrative, Hispanic
colonizers and a diversity of indigenous peoples engaged in the tense
production of mutual knowledge through corporal performance art ranging
from military spectacle to religious acts to pantomime and drama. This
framing of Hispanic/Latina/o culture in the colonial period and beyond as
performed to a captive audience, for a public incarcerated within the matrix
of colonial power, seated within the confines of the Western episteme and
defined as a passive spectator in need of cultural and religious conversion,
allows me to critically reflect on the ethos of performance and the archives of the public stage to further disclose this literature’s foundational epistemic violence. While the scattered archival records of over 300 years of settlement and contact highlight the wide use of music, dance, and drama, as tools for the theatricalization of the colonial regime, the records also confirm these arts’ relevance as a precious space for cultural survival and resistance for the colonized.
Keywords: Neoclassical drama, colonial Spanish California, border theater, Fer- mín de Reygadas, recovered literature, censorship.
"
La poesía y el periodismo fueron los medios principales en que se batió la querella dialéctica por la autonomía e independencia cultural y política de Latinoamérica a comienzos del siglo XIX. Este artículo delinea la centralidad del debate intelectual en torno a la naturaleza americana y en particular a las riquezas minerales y la denuncia criolla de la dependencia española de la plata y el oro americanos en algunas muestras destacadas del extenso corpus literario independentista. En los poemas analizados de Andrés Bello, José Joaquín Olmedo, y Bartolomé Hidalgo, el texto literario se convierte en un espacio ideal para dilucidar por un lado las mecánicas relaciones coloniales de explotación y expropiación mineral y por otro para imaginar el futuro postcolonial y el papel (o su ausencia) de la industria minera en ese nuevo escenario.
Palabras clave: minería, plata, oro, colonialismo, poesía de la independencia, periodismo, orientalismo, Leyenda Negra española, Andrés Bello, José Joaquín Olmedo, Bartolomé Hidalgo, Simón Bolívar.
Poetry and journalism were two closely related forms of expression adopted by writers fighting over the cultural autonomy and political independence of Latin America at the start of the 19th Century. This article maps out the central role of the debate over natural and mineral resources as well as the Spanish dependency on American silver and gold in some of the
relevant works from the Latin American poetry of independence. The poems by Andrés Bello,
José Joaquín Olmedo, and Bartolomé Hidalgo analyzed here, show how literary texts became a suitable space to explore the mechanical colonial relations of mineral exploitation and
expropriation, and also to imagine the postcolonial future and the role (if any) assigned to mining industries in that new scene.
Keywords: mining, silver, gold, colonialism, poetry of independence, journalism, orientalism, Spanish
Black Legend, Andrés Bello, José Joaquín Olmedo, Bartolomé Hidalgo, Simón Bolívar.
Starting from the very final section, and in dialogue with our cover image, three distinguished Latin American poets, Luz Stella Mejía, Luis Carlos Mussó, and Jesús Sepúlveda, our Creative Writing editor, address the COVID-19 pandemic and its challenges to social, political, and even metaphysical confidence. This last year the health crisis has tested our societies and our resilience, often eliciting a firmer commitment to humanistic values, and to the belief that culture can satisfy our desire for a shared campfire story or song, our longing for communal experiences amid separation and loss.
https://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/journal-academic-freedom/call-papers
The 2023 issue of the Journal of Academic Freedom seeks original articles that investigate the links between landscapes of social power and the historical development and contemporary status of academic freedom. For over a century, the AAUP has defended the profession against attacks on academic freedom and has faced many powerful adversaries in the process, yet it has also found and cultivated allies. Preserving academic freedom for a free society entails understanding those who would dismantle or undermine it as well as those who will coalesce in its defense.
Within the United States and internationally, we have witnessed the deleterious effects that authoritarian governments, unchecked corporate interests, reactionary movements, and partisan politics have on academic freedom. Indeed, there is a wide range of impacts that we could cite, from tenure denial, dismissal, and censorship to imprisonment, political exile, and “brain drain.” What can we learn about academic freedom and its contemporary precarity by exposing the forces of power that mobilize against it?
We invite consideration of how academic freedom serves as a touchstone for democracy and the ways that the death of academic freedom signals the atrophy of more inclusive and democratized landscapes of power. What is the relationship between democratic societies and the flourishing of academia and academic freedom within them? What kind of society would powerful forces working against academia and academic freedom usher forth if they had their way? History and comparative international studies give us some clues about a range of possible futures we can envision for academic freedom. Potential topics and questions that prospective authors might explore for volume 14 include the following:
The relative autonomy of the knowledge sector within which the academy is situated. How do academic labor movements, professional associations, and wider social movements and coalitions support academic freedom and resist economic, partisan, and state intrusions that limit this autonomy? How can we acknowledge and strengthen landscapes of power—both within the profession and in the wider society—that bolster and protect academic freedom?
Comparative histories and current examples of academic censorship. How do past and present attempts at thought control, political and religious interference in curricula, and other threats to academic freedom erode civil society and its democratic processes?
Liberal arts programs and colleges and the utilitarian ethos. Are the liberal arts and the transformative critical thinking paradigms they promote being targeted and challenged by specific political or economic groups? What are the agendas behind such attacks? Is the ongoing transformation of liberal arts colleges and departments across the United States and elsewhere into “career-ready” degrees and institutions the result of market-driven forces or an ideological effort to straightjacket knowledge production? What is the current and potential impact of challenges to the liberal arts on academic freedom and shared governance? And its impact on the larger experiment of democracy?
Resisting structures of discipline and coercion in the academic profession. How can educators counteract the routinized behavior imposed by standardized testing in K–12 and higher education and expectations for education as the recitation of established truths? And how can they harness the revolutionary potential of debate and critical thinking and nurture competing narratives, discoveries, or conceptual frameworks to challenge received forms of knowledge?
External agendas or powerful interests in conflict with academic standards. We encourage investigations and analyses that dissect the often-hidden motives and interests of powerful actors. In many instances, these motives may be economic, ideological and partisan, or morally coercive. The attacks on climate scientists, for example, often trace back to powerful economic interests in the fossil-fuel sector but have strong partisan and ideological allies. Contemporary attacks on research and teaching about racism have complex power structures and interests behind them. Are public universities bound by private donor interests and their private corporate or ideological agendas? How does this increasing tendency toward “philanthropy” as a way to support higher education threaten the status of public universities and their foundational mandate to serve democracy and the common good?