Memory and Human Rights: Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula

On September 29-October 1, 2011, the University of Minnesota Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies will host an “International Symposium: Ongoing Dialogues about Memory and Human Rights: Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula.”[1]

The  symposium will address the role that literature, art and film have in the struggles against enforced disappearance, torture, degrading treatment, forced prostitution, human trafficking, violence against immigrants, gender violence, and feminicide. We seek to address the relations between artistic practices and struggles against impunity and between aesthetics and ethics, and to give visibility to current human rights concerns and to the design of practices of memory.

I will be presenting a paper, “The Interactive Global Struggle Against Impunity for Salvadoran Human Rights Violators.”[2]  Other participants and their topics are the following:

• Jean Franco (Emeritus Professor, Columbia University),“The Ghostly Arts.”
• David William Foster (Regents’ Professor of Spanish and Women and Gender Studies, Arizona State University), “Helen Zout’s Desapariciones: Shooting Death.”
• Ileana Rodriguez (Humanities Distinguished Professor, Ohio State University),“ Operación Pájaro: Expediente 27, 1998. Obispo Gerardi: Enemigo del Estado.”
• Horacio Castellanos Moya (Escritor, periodista), READING from “Insensatez (Senselessness) y Tirana memoria (Tyrant memory).”
• Guillermina Wallas (Independent Scholar),“Ciudad y memoria: reclamos de justicia a través de las marcas testimoniales de La Plata (Argentina).”
• Margarita Saona (Associate Professor, Department of Spanish, University of Illinois at Chicago), “Memory Sites: From Auratic Spaces to Cyberspace in Peruvian Embattled Memories.”
• Amy Kaminsky (Professor, Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, University of Minnesota), “Memory, Postmemory, Prosthetic Memory: Reflections on the Holocaust and Argentina’s Dirty War.”
• Hernán Vidal (Emeritus Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, University of Minnesota),“Verdad universal: notas jurídicas para una hermenéutica cultural basada en los derechos humanos.”
• Alicia Kozameh (writer), READING from “Pasos bajo el agua, 259 saltos, uno inmortal, Mano en vuelo,y “Bosquejo de alturas.” Barbara Frey (Program director, Human Rights Program. University of Minnesota),”Forms and Practices of Human Rights Advocacy.”
• Felix de la Concha (Artist),“Facing Memories: Portraits with Testimonies.”
• Patrick J. McNamara, (Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Minnesota,“Memory Without Metaphor: Cognition and the Art of Human Rights in Mexico.”
• Raul Marrero Fente, (Associate Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, University of Minnesota),”Ethics and Law in the Inter-American Human Rights System.”
• Luis Martín Estudillo (Associate Professor, University of Iowa),“The Banality of Torture? Earning Democratic Credentials Under Franco.”
• Miguel Rep (Artist, cartoonist),“Del derecho humano al humor.”
• Regina Marques (Professor of Communication Science at the Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal (Portugal), Member MDM (Movimento Democrático de Mulheres) , CES (Conselho Económico e Social) and WIDF’s (Women’s International Democratic Federation) bureau), “ Women’s Rights as Human Rights. Vulnerabilities in Portugal and in Europe. The Gap Between the Law and Life.”
• Javier Sanjinés (Professor, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan),”Estética y Derechos Humanos bajo la Dictadura en Bolivia: el monumentalismo de Fernando Díez de Medina.”
• Alicia Gaspar de Alba (Writer, Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies, English, and Women’s Studies at UCLA), READING from “Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders.”
• Leigh Payne, (Professor of Sociology and Latin American Studies, University of Oxford, Visiting Professor, Department of Political Sciences, University of Minnesota), “The Struggle Against Silence and Forgetting in Brazil.”
• Alexis Howe, (Assistant Professor, Dominican University), “Madness and Disappearance: El infarto del alma” by Diamela Eltit and Paz Errázuriz.
• Ofelia Ferrán, (Associate Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Minnesota), “Mala gente que camina, by Benjamín Prado: Uncovering the Plot of Franco’s ‘Stolen Children’ in Contemporary Spain.”