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Join the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures for the ILAC Winter Social Gathering and Invited Lecture with Prof. Leila Lehnen.

Abstract: This presentation proposes to look at how Itamar Vieira Junior’s 2018 novel Torto Arado (Crooked Plow) defies the extractive and/or instrumentalizing logic that molds much of the representation of nature in the Brazilian imaginary, even as the narrative references this figuration. On the one hand, Vieira Junior’s novel reveals the lasting effects of Brazil’s colonial and slaveholding legacy on both natural landscapes and the country’s Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous populations. Torto Arado illustrates the violent extractive practices that despoil both nature and marginalized Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous populations. On the other hand, the novel’s narrative fabric resorts to a decolonial aesthetic that challenges the binary between human and non-human, between nature and “culture,” which is one of the hallmarks of Western logic and that corroborates both the colonial project (Plumwood 2003) and, to a degree, the articulation of a postcolonial nation. Instead, Torto Arado postulates an ontology that incorporates the human, the non-human, and the metaphysical. By blurring the frontiers between human and non-human, the material and the spiritual, Vieira Júnior’s text hints at a decolonial epistemology, one which comes about through literary activity. In so doing, Torto Arado highlights the relevance of non-Western epistemologies and environmental practices in the ecological imagination.

Leila Lehnen is��Associate Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University. She was born in Paris, France and grew up in Brazil, Germany, and India. She studied German literature at the Eberhard-Karls Universität, in Tübingen (Germany). She came to the United States on a study abroad program and completed a Masters in Comparative Literature at the University of Washington in Seattle and a PhD at Vanderbilt University. Her research and teaching areas lie primarily in contemporary Brazilian and Latin American literature. Of particular interest to her is the intersection between social justice and cultural production. She has published on topics such as the representation of human rights in contemporary Afro-Brazilian literature,�� memory, literature and Brazil's military dictatorship, the interface between citizenship and literature among other themes. Leila Lehnen has taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder, the University of New Mexico and Macalester College. She is currently the Chair of the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University and the president of the American Portuguese Studies Association.

The lecture begins at 4:30pm. A social reception with dinner will follow at 6:00pm.

Contact: dlclevents [at] stanford.edu (dlclevents[at]stanford[dot]edu)