SEPHIS organizes the third session of its Webinar Series "Emerging Critiques from the South"
                              
Claudio Lomnitz, Columbia University.
Abstract:
Based on my recently published family memoir (Nuestra América) and on my earlier book on a transnational radical network (The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón), I shall reflect on how the transvaluation that is associated with the movement across borders affects the dialectics between major and minor traditions and participation in core or peripheral intellectual networks.
About the Speaker:
Claudio Lomnitz is the Campbell Family Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Columbia University. He works on the history, politics and culture of Latin America, and particularly of Mexico. He received his PhD from Stanford in 1987, and his first book, Evolución de una sociedad rural (Mexico City, 1982) was a study of politics and cultural change in Tepoztlán, Mexico. Since then he has published several notable books like Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in Mexican National Space (California, 1992), Modernidad Indiana (Mexico City, 1999) and Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (Minnesota, 2001), Death and the Idea of Mexico (Zone Books, 2005), The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón (Zone Books, 2014). His most recent book is Nuestra América: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation (Other Press, 2021), which is an essay in family history, that explores the connection between the destruction of Europe and (Latin) American consciousness by way of the early twentieth century history of his own family. In addition to his academic work, his writing features regularly in newspapers like La Jornada and Nexos. He is also a playwright and has written two plays in collaboration with his brother, Alberto Lomnitz, who is a theatre director in Mexico City. The first, El verdadero Bulnes, won Mexico’s National Drama Award in 2010; the most recent, a musical titled La Gran Familia, was produced by Mexico’s National Theatre Company in 2018.
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