Presented by Penn’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese’s annual graduate Conference,"Futuros Imaginados: Ruinas del Presente y Horizontes del Pasado," explores how literature, film, and the arts imagine futures in response to present crises and historical legacies. Topics will cover utopias and dystopias, temporalities, post-apocalyptic narratives, and the transformative potential of ruins. Keynote speakers will include Mexican novelist Yuri Herrera, Dominican novelist and musician Rita Indiana, and Ayuujk linguist and activist Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil. Additionally, the conference will screen a film by Puerto Rican filmmaker Noelia Quintero Herencia and feature a performance by Mixe (Ayuujk) jazz ensemble, Kumantuk Xuxpë.

Thursday, February 27
Rainey Auditorium, Penn Museum

5:00 – 7:00 PM
Screening of the documentary El antes y después de la plena, by Noelia Quintero
Interview conducted by Armando Navarro Rojas and Cecilia Kryzda

Friday, February 28
Cherpack Lounge, Williams Hall 543

10:00 – 10:30 AM – Registration

10:30 – 11:00 AM – Welcome

11:00 AM – 12:30 PM
Panel 1: Utopias and Dystopias: Imagining Alternative Worlds
Moderator: Sean Saxon

• Futurity and Fake News in the Middle of the World: Four Forms of Narrating the Episode of Radio Quito in 1949 – Dr. Juan Suárez Ontaneda (Bryn Mawr College)
• The Poetics of Ancestral-Affect or How Words Can Heal the World: A Proposal for Approaching Afro-Latinx Literature from an African Philosophy – Yesenia Escobar-Espitia (Temple University)
• Against Fungal Horror: Multispecies Narratives and Weird Ecologies in Recent Latin American Literature – Ana Llurba (Rutgers University)
• La doble orilla – Emilio Carrera Quiroga (University of Houston)

12:30 – 2:00 PM – Lunch

2:00 – 3:30 PM
Panel 2: Ruins and Reconstruction: Failure, Memory, and Rebirth
Moderator: Grace Quasebarth

• Las promesas del sideroceno: futuros especulativos en la reacción cultural latinoamericana frente a la bomba atómica – Sebastián Díaz Martínez (CUNY – City University of New York)
• Ruins, Dispossession, and Rebirth: Reimagining the Future Through the Lens of Chávez Ravine – Gia Del Pino (University of Arizona)
• Casas que quieren ser Home (Houses that Want to be Home) – Maribel Bello (University of Houston)
• (Un)Earthing Consumption: Minerals in Contestation in Contemporary Mexican Literature – Francisco Tijerina (Washington University in St. Louis)

3:30 – 5:00 PM
Panel 3: Amerindian Worldviews, Indigenous Becomings, and Other Dislocated Temporalities: Past, Present, and Future in Dialogue
Moderator: Miguel Alejandro Pérez Alvarado

• An Approach to the Relationship Between Humans and Nature in the Quechua Manuscript of Huarochirí – Jesús Rivera Guzmán (University of Pennsylvania)
• Education, Resistance, and Feminisms in Ruins: A Critical Reading of Atusparia by Gabriela Wiener – Anhelé Sánchez Delgado (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
• “El viaje a la semilla” and Temporal Dislocation: An Althusserian Reading of the Amerindian Worldview – Mario del Ama Navidad (Temple University)

5:00 – 7:00 PM
Lecture by Rita Indiana
Presented by Andoni Pérez-López and Astrid López Méndez

Saturday, March 1
Humanities Conference Room, Williams Hall 623

9:00 – 9:30 AM · Bread, coffee, and fruit

9:30 – 11:00 AM
Panel 4: Crisis and Resistance: Post-Apocalyptic Narratives in Hispanic and Lusophone Culture
Moderator: Yuxuan Miao

• Poetry Against Fascism: How César Vallejo Builds Solidarity – David Lemus (Stanford University)
• Reggaetón pa’l fin del mundo – Jack Brown (Cornell University)
• Repression and Resilience in Portuguese Theater: Cultural Transformations During the Marcelist Spring – Marta Ribeiro Figueiredo (Temple University/Complutense University of Madrid)
• An Amateur Literature on the Migration Crisis in Mauro Javier Cárdenas’ American Abductors – Ángela Margarita Suárez-Orellano (New York University)

11:00 AM – 12:30 PM
Conversation with Yuri Herrera
Presented by Alexis Hernando and Erik Alonso

12:30 – 2:00 PM · Lunch

2:00 – 3:45 PM
Panel 5: Utopian Horizons: Reconfigurations of History in Literature and Cultural Studies
Moderator: Dolores González Ortega

• The Cyborg and Its Other: Cuban Cyberpunk’s Disruption of the Human – Bianca M. Peña Ruiz (University of Puerto Rico -Río Piedras)
• Redefining Heroes and Rebuilding Worlds - Afro-Brazilian Youth in Ale Santos’ O último ancestral – Dr. Karen de Melo (University of Richmond)
• Cyborg Marronage Across Time and Space: Chronopolitical Utopias in Puerto Rican Afrofuturist Literature – Pat Santalices Torres (Columbia University)
• Nadie es un “daño colateral”: La ética del narrar más allá del Calderonismo – Mariana Riestra (University of Texas at El Paso)
• A Monument to Failure: On “The Birth of a New World” in Puerto Rico – Lucas Iberico Lozada (University of Southern California)

4:00 – 5:30 PM
Lecture by Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil
Presented by Marco Avilés

6:00 – 7:00 PM
Concert by Kumantuk Xuxpë
Presented by Natalia Reyes