Guests beside the Grain: Parasitism and Hospitality in Late Capitalist Spain
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“Guests beside the Grain: Parasitism and Hospitality in Late Capitalist Spain”
About the talk...
Immunity, from the moment it becomes a biopolitical concept, was long associated with the security and integrity of bodies. The modern nation state, in imagining its own sovereignty and boundaries, represents the body politic under the same immunological paradigm of defense, and like in biomedical discourse, those who contaminate the homeland are coded as external and often castaway as parasites, viruses, and other malignant presences. This talk reconsiders the utility of the parasite in light of changing notions of immunity in recent decades, from a security to a symbiogenetic paradigm of the self. A set of Spanish- and Catalan-language novels will be analyzed that together provide a comprehensive reflection on, and reconsideration of, the concept of parasitism as a powerful instigator for rethinking the complex associations between the subject and the external environment and for producing systemic complexity in the context of social, political, and anthropocentric crisis.
About the speaker...
William Viestenz is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where he holds a joint appointment in the Institute for Global Studies. He graduated from Stanford University with a Ph.D. in Iberian and Latin American Cultures in 2011.
Prof. Viestenz specializes in modern Iberian literature and culture, with an emphasis on the intersection of Catalan Studies and political theory. He is the author of By the Grace of God: Franco’s Spain and the Sacred Roots of Political Imagination (U. Toronto Press, 2014) and has coedited The New Ruralism: An Epistemology of Transformed Space (Iberoamericana/Vervuert 2013), Ethics of Life: Contemporary Iberian Debates (Vanderbilt University Press 2016), and A Polemical Companion to Ethics of Life: Contemporary Iberian Debates (Hispanic Issues Online). He has published multiple articles in specialized journals and contributed to a number of edited volumes. At present, he is the Editor-in-Chief of The Catalan Review and an Associate Managing Editor of Hispanic Issues/Hispanic Issues Online.
Registration available via Eventbrite here.
