February 20th | Yunning Zhang on “The Passion According to La China Poblana: Martyrdom and Distress in Catarina de San Juan’s Vida (1689-1692) by Alonso Ramos”

gtimir

Please join the Affect and the Emotions Workshop on

Monday, February 20th, on Zoom, 4:30-6:00pm CT

when

Yunning Zhang

PhD Student, Department of Comparative Literature, University of Chicago

presents:

“The Passion According to La China Poblana: Martyrdom and Distress in Catarina de San Juan’s Vida (1689-1692) by Alonso Ramos”

 

 

Discussant: J. Michelle Molina, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Northwestern University

 

Description: This paper examines distressful martyrdoms in the three-volume hagiography of Catarina de San Juan (ca.1607-1688) who, born to the royal family of the Mughal Empire, disembarked in New Spain via the Manila Galleon as a domestic slave, before dying a venerated mystic in Puebla de los Ángeles. Catarina, popularly known as la china poblana, has long been an object of curiosity for scholars of Colonial Latin American studies and has been established as an emblem for the multicultural, multiracial baroque society of New Spain. This paper, however, reads her as a body in distress that was afflicted with two opposing sides of violence: the persecution of Jesuit missionaries in her visions, and the martyrizing violence with which her sexualized and racialized body suffered in her pilgrimage to the Americas. Contrary to the European /Novohispanic martyrs globally celebrated for their glorious sacrifice for faith in the “Far East”, Catarina’s “martyrdoms” shed light on the ways in which the gruesome sufferings of the other ethnicity and the other sex had been reappropriated for the writing of an early modern trans-Pacific account of felicitous encounters and salvation.

 

November 28th | Qiuchen Wu on “Girls Geist (2019) with Recent Reflections”

gtimir

Please join the Affect and the Emotions Workshop on

Monday, November 28th, Cochrane-Woods Arts Center 156, 4:30-6:00pm CT

when

Qiuchen Wu

M.F.A. Candidate, Department of Visual Arts, University of Chicago

presents:

“Girls Geist (2019) with Recent Reflections “

 

Discussant: Yeti Kang, PhD Student, Divinity School

 

 

A nine-minute video featuring a girl sitting and reading presumably her journal about her beloved idol. A less phenomenological description of it would be: an attempt on expressing the grammatical difference between a Hegelian girl and a girlish Hegel.After an installation of this three-year old work in a show, I finally gathered enough amount of uneasewhich forced me to deliberate on its various problematics. I would like to take this workshop as an opportunity to share with you those difficulties (e.g., historical and current intentions; representation and responsibility; identification and plentitude; beauty and competition) with an autobiographical account of my own recent trajectory of becoming a fan in K-pop.

May 23rd || Seth Estrin on “Between Pity and Rage: Constructing Emotion in Archaic Funerary Sculpture”

katiebellamy

Please join the Affect and the Emotions Workshop on

Monday, May 23rd, Wieboldt 408, 4:30-6:00pm CT

when

Seth Estrin

Assistant Professor of Art History and the College; Ancient Greek Art and Archaeology

presents the paper:

“Between Pity and Rage: Constructing Emotion in Archaic Funerary Sculpture”

Discussant: Emily Austin, Assistant Professor of Classics and the College

The history of Greek art has traditionally been traced according to the development of artistic naturalism, and the possibility of emotional expression has usually been associated only with later periods of Greek art, in which this naturalism was fully achieved. In this paper, I look for emotion in an unexpectedly early era of Greek art—the later part of the so-called Archaic period (ca. 550-480 BCE), which produced sculptures normally seen as cold, stiff, and inexpressive. Focusing on a funerary monument for a man named Kroisos, I use the emotional language of the monument’s epigram –specifically, its invocation of pity and rage – as the basis for imagining alternative ways of visualizing the sculpture that accompanied it. In so doing, I seek to activate emotional dimensions of Archaic sculpture that would be otherwise invisible to modern eyes.
The paper, to be read in advance, is available on the workshop website.

If you have any questions or concerns, please email Jane Gordon (jgordon616@uchicago.edu) or Bellamy Mitchell (bellamy@uchicago.edu).