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Dr. Tomás Urayoán Noel Presents "Virtually Latino/a: A Poetics”

November 13, 2014
All Day
Ohio Union Multicultural Center

Event Host: Latino & Latin American Space for Enrichment and Research (LASER)


Dr. Tomás Urayoán Noel, professor at New York University, and author of In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam, presents “Virtually Latino/a: A Poetics”.

This hybrid talk/performance proposes a “virtual” approach to Latino/a identity attuned to the problematics of perception and transmission. Building on virtuality theorists such as N. Katherine Hayles and Brian Massumi, this presentation outlines an alternative genealogy of Latino/a art and politics in an effort to bridge the social-movements of the 1960s and 1970s and the social-media present. Echoing Massumi's characterization of virtuality as a “movement in perception,” the presentation maps an experimental political imagination, from the Royal Chicano Air Force in the 1960s to the El Puerto Rican Embassy website in the 1990s and beyond. The last part of the presentation consists of a reading of original poetry, much of it composed and/or performed with the aid of a smartphone, and informed by the virtuality poetics discussed in the first part. The hybrid format of this presentation is partly an attempt to embody these problematics of perception and transmission, and to consider these playful poetics of institutional critique in all their messiness and complexity.

For more information, visit the LASER website.

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