Kalendář

Invitation to POLITICAL READING OF CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

• Dec 5th, 2019: Faculty of Arts UK, Náměstí Jana Palacha 1/2, Praha 1, Room P104

• Dec 6th, 2019: Swéerts-Sporck Palace, Hybernská 3, Praha 1, Room H303

We cordially invite you to an international workshop in Prague organized by Department of Slavonic Languages and Literatures, University of Zurich, Department of Czech Literature and Comparative Literature and Department of Political Science of Charles University (CU – UZH Joint Seed Funding).

Dr. Tereza Jiroutová - Kynčlová from the Department of Gender studies will also present her paper entitled Chicana Feminist Literature, U.S.-Mexico Border and the Case of the Juárez Murders

Abstract:

Chicana literature is unthinkable without its geographical rooting in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands and its explicit feminist and anti-capitalist stance. This position is thoroughly exemplified in the writings by Alicia Gaspar de Alba. The twin cities of El Paso and Juárez form a backdrop for her novel Desert Blood (2005) that takes up the ongoing gender violence faced by female maquiladora workers. As frequently argued, the effects of the 1993 ratification of NAFTA gradually turned Ciudad Juárez into a major hub of transnational trade and the center of US-owned corporations that built maquiladoras employing thousands of young women of poor, working-class background at the industrial assembly lines. Between 1994 and 2000, more than 300 (some sources speak of as many as a thousand) of them were savagely murdered having been severely tortured before their death. The mutilated bodies were then strewn in the desert to decompose. In the novel, Gaspar de Alba’s queer main protagonist who had grown up on the border ends up searching for her very own—presumably kidnapped—sister while delving deeper both into the horrid situation of the Juarez femi(ni)cides. Read against contemporary theoretical conceptualization of the U.S.-Mexico border with the utilization of scholarly interventions on Juárez contained in Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera (2010) the paper will analyze the intersection of gender, migration, and globalization in Gaspar de Alba’s novel Desert Blood (2005).

Full programme.