PHAIS Seminar Series Week 25: Professor Charlotte Rogers (Art History)

The PHAIS Seminar Series meets weekly in term time to discuss a paper by a visiting Philosopher, Historian, Art Historian or a member of our academic staff.

Confronting Climate Change in the World’s Oldest Colony: The Art and Literature of Puerto Rico’s Contested Coasts

Professor Charlotte Rogers, University of Virginia

Along Puerto Rico’s 700 miles of coastline, hurricanes beat the island from the ocean side, while luxury tourist developments encroach from the land. These forces converge in the “terrestrial maritime zone” (ZMT in Spanish), which includes littoral areas and navigable portions of waterways in which “tides and the biggest waves from storms can be felt.” This clunky legal term, notable for its shifting and affective dimension, has become part of everyday conversations and creative practices in contemporary Puerto Rico, but no academic study has considered its cultural significance. This talk proposes that works of art and literature in the ZMT are “autogestiones acuáticas,” or independently imagined and managed shoreline activities that contest coastal displacement and articulate a decolonial sense of place within non-sovereign dynamics. 

Biography

Charlotte Rogers is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia, where she is a former director of Environmental Humanities. Her academic books and articles examine Latin American and Caribbean arts and letters from decolonial and environmental humanities perspectives. She is the author of Jungle Fever: Exploring Madness and Medicine in Twentieth Century Tropical Narratives (Vanderbilt U P 2012) and Mourning El Dorado: Literature and Extractivism in the Contemporary American Tropics (U of Virginia P, 2019). Her current work analyzes how both canonical and emerging literary texts and works of art engage with environmental change and imagine possible ecological futures in venues such as Latin American Research Review and Small Axe: A Journal of Caribbean Criticism. 

 The speaker will deliver this seminar on Zoom but a room will be available on campus for those who wish to attend in person.