Land Defense and Counterfactual Mourning

The Department of Spanish & Portuguese is delighted to welcome professor Carolyn Fornoff (Cornell University) for a visit to our Department, and invite you to join us for a lecture by our guest.

About the Presentation:
In response to the sustained violence faced by Indigenous land defenders in Mexico, aesthetic forms of mourning and resistance have tended toward the reverent depiction of land defenders as heroic martyrs. This elegiac response is understandable, even necessary, given extractivist attempts to delegitimize land defense. Yet in this talk, I examine how land defense has also been generatively represented through irreverent, ludic aesthetic modes that present land defenders not only as heroes but also as desiring and rageful feminist subjects. To do so, I focus on queer performance artist Naomi Rincón Gallardo’s Trilogía de cuevas, a performance series about feminist land defense in Oaxaca and Zacatecas. Through raucous songs and sensual dance, Rincón Gallardo foregrounds the importance of female pleasure in land defense. This work illustrates the rise of subjunctive aesthetic modes in response to environmental crisis, modes that seek to go beyond what is and to imagine what could be or what should be.

About the Presenter:
Carolyn Fornoff is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University. Her work examines how Mexican and Central American literature, film, and visual art respond to environmental crisis. Her first book, Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change, was published with Vanderbilt University Press in 2024. She has co-edited two volumes in the environmental humanities: Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema (SUNY Press, 2021). She is currently co-chair of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession and serves on the editorial boards of Hispanic Review and ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment).