March 26th, 909 Renaissance Park, 4PM – 5:30 PM
While the baroque is typically understood as a quasi-emancipatory aesthetic phenomenon that emerges from a European inter-political problem (i.e., the Counter Reformation and its aftermaths), this talk proposes a different genealogy for the baroque in the indigenous, colonial Americas. In switching out the context of the baroque from Europe to the Americas, this talk reframes both the place of indigeneity in the formation of the baroque and the aesthetic forms (such as the paintings of Caravaggio) that have come to define the baroque. The aim is to propose a renewed understanding of baroque sovereignty as a state of exception conditioned by the specific geopolitical, cultural, and intellectual locale of the Americas.
Edgar Garcia is a poet and scholar of the hemispheric cultures of the Americas. He is an Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago, where he also teaches in the department of Creative Writing. In the past year (2022-2023) he has been visiting editor in chief of Fence.
He is the author of Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence Books, 2019); Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2020); and Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022); among other works and collaborations.