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Speaker(s): Antonio Monegal (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

How are other languages and cultures, other than Catalan and Spanish, represented in Catalan documentaries that address cultural diversity in a globalized city such as Barcelona. To what extent can visual production—and in particular documentary film—be a tool of political intervention, what function does it serve and what impact can it have? In a sense, it’s a way of asking how culture, and the arts, can be made socially relevant. The goal is to examine the critical drive inscribed in particular projects and how the political discourse is determined by the requirements and program applied in the development of the work, that is, how the politics is governed by the poetics.
 
Antonio Monegal is the Josep Pla Visiting Professor in the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures. He is professor of literary theory and comparative literature at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona since 1994. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1989, taught at Cornell University until his return to Spain, and has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Princeton and the University of Chicago. Among other publications, he is the author of Luis Buñuel de la literatura al cine (Anthropos, 1993) and En los límites de la diferencia: Poesía e imagen en las vanguardias hispánicas (Tecnos, 1998). He has edited Literatura y pintura (Arco Libros, 2000), En Guerra (CCCB, 2004), Política y (po)ética de las imágenes de guerra (Paidós, 2007), and García Lorca’s Viaje a la luna (Pre-Textos, 1994) and El público y El sueño de la vida (Alianza, 2000). His current research focuses on the politics of culture and on the representation of wars in literature and the visual arts. In 2004 he co-curated with Francesc Torres and José María Ridao an exhibition entitled “At War” at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. Between 2009 and 2013, he was the vice president of the Arts Council of Barcelona and presided over its Executive Committee.