Mexico Noir: Rethinking the Dark in Contemporary Narrative and Photography

Speakers at this interdisciplinary event include internationally acclaimed writer Cristina Rivera Garza and artist Gerardo Suter, visual culture theorist and curator José Luis Barrios, cultural historian and critic John Kraniauskas, urban film and theory specialist Geoffrey Kantaris and literary critic Elsa Treviño.

This symposium will adopt an intermedial and interdisciplinary approach to exploring the allusive nexus of the dark in contemporary Mexican narrative and photography during decades of deepening crisis marked by the high profile staging of atrocities and the re-emergence of an ironic noir aesthetic.

Further information & to register for this free event:
http://www.latin-american.cam.ac.uk/events/mexico-noir

Symposium Programme (provisional)

9:00 - 9:30
Registration and Coffee

9:30
Keynote: Cristina Rivera Garza (University of California San Diego): Los materiales ajenos: escritura, oscuridad y muerte en el México de hoy / Estranged Materials: Writing, Darkness and Death in Contemporary Mexico

11:00
John Kraniauskas (Birkbeck College, London): Roberto Bolaño’s "2666": as Noir and as Installation

12:00
Gerardo Suter (Universidad Autónoma de Morelos): Blink: The connectivity of Darkness and the conceptual framework of the expanded image

13:15 - 14:30
Lunch

14:45
José Luis Barrios (Iberoamericana, Mexico City) Encuadres de la oscuridad y violencia inaudita en "Los detectives salvajes" de Roberto Bolaño y "Heli" de Amat Escalante / Framing Darkness and Unspeakable Violence in Roberto Bolaño’s "The Savage Detectives" and Amat Escalante's film "Heli"

15:45
Geoffrey Kantaris (University of Cambridge): 'Techno-noir in the Borderlands: Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer (2008)'.

16:45
Elsa Treviño (University of Cambridge): Basta de Luz!: Configurations of revelatory Darkness in Guadalupe Nettel's "El huésped" (2006), Ignacio Padilla's "Espiral de artillería" (2003) and Jorge Volpi's "Oscuro bosque oscuro" (2009)

17:45
Round Table-Taller: collage of citations on the dark, speakers and convenor with questions from the floor.

19:00
Wine Reception in the Centre of Latin American Studies, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road (nr the Sidgwick site). All welcome.