"Not Looking At, Looking With." [Virtual Event]
The second event in the series ReMemory: Experiments in Listening, Authorship, and Knowledge-Keeping will feature author and scholar Edgar Garcia. Garcia’s book Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis takes the Maya creation story, The Popol Vuh, and explores its history and relevance as a text created within and responding to the crisis of colonialism. Through nine short essays, Garcia considers what a world at the intersection of its own social, political, and intellectual emergencies might learn from the story of the Popol Vuh. This event will feature a short talk by Garcia, followed by a Q&A with the audience.
Edgar Garcia is the author of Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence Books, 2019), Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022). He is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago.
2024-25 ReMemory: Experiments in Listening, Authorship and Knowledge-Keeping Series:
In this series, we highlight the work of artists, scholars, and knowledge-keepers whose works attend to what Toni Morrison describes as the “pitched battle between remembering and forgetting.” (Morrison 2019) The reparative labor of re-memory invites us to recognize the ways that we are intimately bound up with undocumented or under-documented histories and the urgent need for "reconstituting and recollecting a usable past.” Kenyan author and scholar Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, whose work seeks to redress the historical amnesia and “dismemberment” of the colonial enterprise, sees memory as “the site of dreams, and of desire, is thus crucial to the construction of our being.”
From Yohance Lacour, whose audio documentary work You Didn’t See Nothin deftly weaves memoir and investigative reporting, recontextualizing and reexamining the impact of a hate crime on the south side of Chicago and on the life of Lacour himself, to documentary filmmaker Rodrigo Reyes, whose films enact multiple forms of participatory authorship to create narratives that emerge as a third space wherein the hidden poetry of marginalized communities can flourish; to scholar Edgar Garcia. Garcia’s book Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis takes the Maya creation story, The Popol Vuh, and explores its history and relevance in contemporary moments of crisis,; to Renata Cherlise, writer, artist, and founder of Black Archives, a “gathering place for Black memory and imaginations,” we will engage in conversations on listening, authorship, and knowledge-keeping. As Thiong'o asserts, “Creative imagination is one of the greatest of re-membering practices.”
Events will take place on Thursday evenings (ET) from 6-7:00PM and will either be virtual or in-person.