Event Type: Workshops
Date
May 1, 2026
Location
Heyman Center, Common Room
Time
3:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Event Organizer
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS)
Event Sponsor
Event Co-Sponsor(s)
Please join us for the final Dissertation Colloquium of the semester Friday, May 1st, from 3:00-5:00pm in the Heyman Center Conference Room. Please RSVP here for access to the Heyman center. Papers will be made available through the google drive (link here).
Following the workshop, we will walk to Ellington in the Park to celebrate the end of the academic year and the colloquium‘s many presenters!
We will be discussing the following work by ICLS graduates:
Ana Claudio, “The Figure of the Chinese Muslim between China and Egypt State Media, 1955-1966”
This chapter investigates the visual cosmopolitics of the Upper Amazon borderland between Peru and Brazil, centering its investigation on the work of Shipibo-Konibo multi-artist Chonon Bensho. While acknowledging the region as a territory of profound cultural, socio-environmental, and economic complexity, this study shifts the focus from a descriptive analysis of conflicts to an investigation of kené graphics. It argues that kené serves as an ancestral element of resistance and survival within Bensho’s oeuvre, acting as a visual matrix that connects the material world to oneiric and spiritual dimensions. Through a comparative lens that includes other Amazonian artists such as Sara Flores and Christian Bendayán, the study demonstrates how Bensho claims aesthetic autonomy grounded in a “politics of intimacy.” Moreover, by foregrounding Shipibo-Konibo cosmological figures and communal life against a backdrop of kené patterns, Bento reveals a private universe that negotiates identity and resists hegemonic representations of the forest, producing an “ecology of fabulation”— or an aesthetic and ontological strategy that asserts the persistence of Indigenous world-making and the power of visionary epistemology as a mode of existence and spiritual continuity.
This chapter investigates the visual cosmopolitics of the Upper Amazon borderland between Peru and Brazil, centering its investigation on the work of Shipibo-Konibo multi-artist Chonon Bensho. While acknowledging the region as a territory of profound cultural, socio-environmental, and economic complexity, this study shifts the focus from a descriptive analysis of conflicts to an investigation of kené graphics. It argues that kené serves as an ancestral element of resistance and survival within Bensho’s oeuvre, acting as a visual matrix that connects the material world to oneiric and spiritual dimensions. Through a comparative lens that includes other Amazonian artists such as Sara Flores and Christian Bendayán, the study demonstrates how Bensho claims aesthetic autonomy grounded in a “politics of intimacy.” Moreover, by foregrounding Shipibo-Konibo cosmological figures and communal life against a backdrop of kené patterns, Bento reveals a private universe that negotiates identity and resists hegemonic representations of the forest, producing an “ecology of fabulation”— or an aesthetic and ontological strategy that asserts the persistence of Indigenous world-making and the power of visionary epistemology as a mode of existence and spiritual continuity.
Miguel Ángel Blanco Martínez, “Andalusian Feminism: The Iberian South as a Borderland”
This chapter develops a feminist artivist cartography of the Iberian South by situating the emergence of Andalusian feminism within transnational feminist movements in contemporary Spain. It first outlines the movement’s key intellectual foundations to establish a framework for analyzing its distinctive cultural contributions. The second part traces an artivist feminist genealogy through case studies in performance, music, graffiti, and illustration, showing how Andalusian feminism constructs a multilocal, emancipatory political imagination connected to broader Global South struggles.
