Tulane launch for Season of the Swamp with author Yuri Herrera in conversation with Carolina Sánchez, Zemurray-Stone Post-Doctoral Fellow.

What are the limits of history and how do artists and writers create new approaches to narrating the past?  Kaiama Glover and Laurent Dubois explore these questions in their forthcoming translation of Jean-Claude Fignolé’s novel Aube tranquille (Quiet Dawn). Our conversation will center on the artistic movement known as Spiralism, which emerged in Haiti in the 1960s under François Duvalier's dictatorship.

In the aftermath of the Revolution of 1910, Mexican artists, scholars, and government officials worked to revive the image and idea of the original Mexica (Aztec) capital in Modern Mexico City. A tight social network of thinkers oversaw a conceptual excavation of Tenochtitlan in the context of a rapidly modernizing urban landscape, actively rewriting the myth of the capital's Hispanic origins in favor of a mestizo civic identity--a process that in many ways continues to this day.

Join us for our tailgate as we gather to cheer on the Green Wave! Stop by before the game to catch up with us, enjoy delicious empanadas, and grab a drink. 

For the Classic Maya, night was an alien landscape, antithetical and inimical to humans, the domain of predatory, rapacious animals such as jaguars, bats, and mosquitos. As I’ve shown previously (Zender 2010, 2012), such creatures are classified in Maya writing and art as “nocturnal” through the visual infixation of an element reading AHK’AB ‘darkness’. Some of these beings are actually nightmarish, such as the shrieking bats often shown holding plates of dismembered human body parts, their wings marked with disembodied eyes, crossed bones, and mandibles.

History of the West Indies in general, and Guadeloupe in particular, oscillates between historical facts and fictions. How does a simple myth become a definitive history that inspires heroes and political action? How is a myth created? What are the components of the myth of Mulâtresse Solitude, a character who inspired novels of authors such as André Schwarz-Bart and his wife Simone, as well as most accounts of the Resistance in Guadeloupe? How did the myth of Solitude come about, and how do we know she ever really lived? 

The Stone Center is organizing the 21st annual Tulane University Student Conference on Latin America (TUSCLA) on Saturday, November 16th, 2024 at Jones Hall. The Stone Center invites all undergraduate and graduate students, both inside and outside of the Latin American Studies programs, to come attend, present, or speak about their work on Latin America.