Karen Spira, Assistant Professor of Spanish, traveled to Havana, Cuba to present her research at the international symposium Global Indigenismo: 50 Years from the Death of José María Arguedas on November 28 at the Casa de las Américas, a cultural institution that supports and promotes Latin American artistic and scholarly creation.
The symposium aimed to shine new light on the work of twentieth-century Peruvian author and anthropologist José María Arguedas by approaching his work through contemporary theoretical lenses. Drawing on both Arguedas’s and contemporary scholars’ writings about indigenous Andean cosmovisions, Karen’s presentation, “Non-Human Teachers in Deep Rivers,” suggested a new reading of his celebrated 1958 novel by interpreting the river as a key teacher of the novel’s adolescent protagonist.