Other Senses: Amazonian Poetics of Counter-Coloniality
Leila Lehen, Brown University
This presentation investigates how Amazonian poetry mobilizes the senses to confront colonial violence and its persistent legacies, such as extractivism and epistemic and ecological violence. Drawing on poems by Sony Ferseck (Makuxi), María Clara Sharupi (Shuar), and Anastasia Candre (Okaina-Uitoto), the talk proposes that the works of these authors construct a multispecies sensorium that challenges the colonial logic which, historically, reduced non-Western cultures, subalternized subjects, and other-than-human existences to the condition of exploitable resources.
Uyra: A Trans*Amazonian
Jeremy Lehnen, Brown University
This presentation argues, that Uyra: A retomada da floresta (Juliana Curi 2022) posits the trans *community as staying with the Amazon, embodying a commitment to re-imagining the possibilities of the now by eschewing the discourse of futurity to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway). The film moves outside and beyond the binary opposition between queer non-futurity and hetero-reproductive futurism (Edelman). Rather, Uyra re-envisions a queer present as at once infused with Julio Esteban Muñoz’s desire for new ways of being, doing, and relating, this is to say, queer as possibility.
October 16, 3 pm | Room 2, CES
Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88146120797?pwd=aihhnt1h94xvFUi9VIjITkxIoTkzR7.1–