Talking Trash: Cultural Uses of Waste

CERS book talk by Maite Zubiaurre (UCLA, Spanish & Portuguese, Germanic Languages). Discussants: Charlene Villaseñor Black (UCLA, Art History and Chicana Studies) and Allison Carruth (UCLA, English and the Institute for the Environment and Sustainability).

Thursday, May 28, 2020
2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
Zoom Webinar (Pacific Time)

AUDIO AND VIDEO PODCASTS:
CLICK HERE to view and listen to podcasts of the webinar.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Much has been written about landfills and the monumentality of rubbish, but little attention has been paid to "litter," the small trash that soils the urban pavement, like the bits of chewing gum that some artists decorate. Talking Trash looks at refuse in its early stages, when it is still tiny and unassuming, still lives in the city, and has yet to grow, leave the metropolis, and accumulate in landfills.
The chapters of Talking Trash reflect upon the anthropomorphic nature of urban refuse; upon the poetics and semantics of micro-litterscapes and the archives of all things discarded; upon "Dumpsterology," or the history of the garbage container as a gendered artifact dense with cultural meaning; and upon "dirty innocence," or the complex and contradictory link that ties childhood to muck.
The author also focuses on one significant non-urban scene, the desert landscape and the clothing and other items that immigrants discard as they make a desperate trek across the border.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Maite Zubiaurre is Associate Dean for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, Humanities Division, and Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Department of Germanic Languages at UCLA. Her areas of expertise are Twentieth-century Peninsular literature; European (particularly German) and Latin American Realism; comparative literature; gender studies; urban studies; cultural studies; Latin American women's fiction; and Latina and Chicana fiction.

DISCUSSANTS:

Charlene Villaseñor Black, whose research focuses on the art of the Ibero-American world, is Professor of Art History and Chicana/o Studies at UCLA. While much of her research investigates the politics of religious art and global exchange, she is also actively engaged in the Chicana/o art scene.

Allison Carruth is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. Her current research interests include environmental narrative and science communication; the role of artists and writers in American environmental and food justice movements; and the evolving relationships between ecology, sustainability and engineering in the US since the 1980s.

 

Cost : Free and open to the public. RSVP is required at above link.

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Duration: 01:15:25

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Sponsor(s): Center for European and Russian Studies, Germanic Languages, Spanish and Portuguese