Alumnus Braden Clinger Publishes in Romance Notes
Braden Clinger, a recent alumnus of our PhD program in Hispanic Language & Literatures, has published a piece in Romance Notes.
The article, titled “Tecnología en los toldos: los automatas de beber en Juan Moreira” examines the use of electric and mechanical metaphors in the depiction of indigenous people in the wildly popular late-19th-century Argentine bandit novel Juan Moreira. By contextualizing the novel, and in particular the scene where the eponymous bandit hides out among the Voroga people, within the historical and cultural legacies of the Argentine gaucho frontier, the figure of the automaton, and the then-recent arrival of electricity to Buenos Aires, Clinger argues that beyond their clear dehumanizing functions, these descriptions of indigenous subjects reveal an ontological unease with technology that parallels the widespread concern with the closure of the Argentine frontier.