Welcome
to the Institute
PATRONS:
The Hon Justice Michael Kirby AC CMG
Professor Lowitja O'Donoghue AC CBE
The Institute of Postcolonial Studies
is an autonomous educational institution located in Melbourne,
Australia. It has linkages to major universities and research
bodies both in Australia and internationally. We invite you
to use this website to explore the Institute - its people,
programmes, scholarship, activism and research.
Semester
One Seminar Series
Futuros de Latinoamérica
Latin America after “Latin America”
Convener: Carlos Morreo
Thursday, May 15
78-80 Curzon Street, North Melbourne,
VIC 3051
Jeff Browitt
4.30pm:
“Translating Indigenous Resistance, Translating
Carlos Monsivais’ New Catechism”
In 1982, Mexican public intellectual Carlos Monsiváis
published a formidable defence of indigenous mimickery, A New
Catechism for Recalcitrant Indians. This text of fables takes
aim at the conquest of the Mexican mind by the Catholic Church
in the decades following Cortés’ conquest in 1521.
Monsiváis refers to his work as “history as it should
have been," and it parodies the language of colonial-era
catechisms and other practical religious texts to skewer what
Jeff Browitt describes as “the illogicity of theological
arguments.”
Jeff has recently completed the translation of this text, and
will talk about the work of translation, and the necessary negotiations
across languages in a work that is itself ultimately all about
translation and negotiation.
7:30pm:
“On Modernity in Latin America”
Jeff Browitt will explore the relevance of the debates surrounding
modernity to “Latin America”, which paradoxically
is both central and marginal to these debates. On the one hand,
Latin America has come to be seen as the most marginalised space
of the Occidental world. On the other hand it remains central
to the very constitution of Modern Europe. And, to make things
even more complicated, within the continent itself, the notion
of a “Latin American Modernity” has itself been the
subject of debate amongst many thinkers, governments and intellectuals.
Jeff Browitt is a senior lecturer in Latin American studies and
Head of Latin American Studies in the Institute for International
Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney.
Charges: Waged $5, unwaged $3, members free.
For details about the rest of the series please download our
most recent newsletter.
Speech by Professor
Lowitja O'Donoghue
Book launch, 4th August 2006, Melbourne:
click here for full text of speech
Past newsletters are still available for download.
