Sembe Talks Twice at NeMLA
Karina Sembe, doctoral student in our Hispanic Language & Literatures program, gave two talks at the 2020 Northeast Modern Language Association annual conference. Karina tells us:
“On Thursday, I talked biopolitics of race in Modernist literature across the Americas (“Race in Modernism across the Americas: Revisiting Biopolitics of Blackness in Modernist Manifestos.”) It was a truly interdisciplinary roundtable​, the topics spanned centuries and continents. We had a nuanced and complex discussion on radicalized identities in literature; biopolitical connotations of death; terrorism and immigration policies; and more.
On Friday, I presented on the gang culture and vernacular empiricism in the Brazilian film City of God by Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund (“The Gang and the City: Childhood, Masculinity, and Vernacular Empiricism in Cidade de Deus.”). As I expand my area of expertise to Brazil, this panel is my first attempt to present on the Lusophone culture from a non-comparative perspective and have an academic discussion in Portuguese. I tested the waters and it went pretty well, and I’m looking forward to exploring the field further.”