10am – Performing Rurality
This roundtable connects research projects that look at literature/performance and aurality to problematize dualities such as rural/urban; modernity/tradition, local/transnational etc., to propose a theorization of the rural as agent of knowledge, aesthetics, and politics.
Moderated by Pepa Anastasio, (Hofstra University) featuring short papers by Rebecca Haidt (The Ohio State University), Llorián García Flórez (Universidad de Oviedo), Luke Bowe (New York University), and Belenish Moreno Gil & Óscar Escudero.
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Presentation Titles:
Moderator: Pepa Anastasio
Belenish Moreno Gil & Óscar Escudero – “Ni chulapas, ni de madriz. Héroes o Bestias una zarzuela desubicada”
Héroes o Bestias es una zarzuela cuyo argumento principal reflexiona sobre la Guerra Civil española la cual, para una generación millennial a la que apenas nos quedan protagonistas vivos, se ha convertido en una virtualidad, en una reconstrucción arqueológica. Las protagonistas de la obra, Pepa (la abuela), Isabel (la madre) y María (la hija) no nos hablan del frente o de las trincheras, ellas nos narran desde lo cotidiano, desde el campo y el pueblo.
Luke Bowe – “Performing Asturfuturity”
What role does the rural play in future imaginaries of Asturias? How are such imaginaries performed and enacted? This contribution considers two visions of Asturian rurality as represented in the music, performance, and philosophies of two contemporary Asturian musicians, Rodrigo Cuevas and Pablo Und Destruktion. Inspired by other -futurisms, I propose asturfuturity as a political and critical framework to analyze their use of music inspired by the past in the construction of distinct Asturian futures.
Rebecca Haidt – “Castile’s Forgotten Family Tree”: On Translating Rural Contexts of Coronado’s “Raza”
Marianist devotion swelled in Spain in the 17th and 18th centuries. During the reign of Isabel II, royal visits to ermitas and shrines were strategized to project piety. In the mid-1840s, the writer Carolina Coronado frequently sought healing and refuge at the Ermita de Nuestra Señora de Botoa outside Badajoz (Extremadura). At Botoa, Coronado meditated and wrote in a small room looking out onto vast pasture lands. Coronado was developing a poetic way to synthesize ideas about Iberian and European (racial) degeneration, with the problem of patriarchal squandering of women’s—and rural, natural– energies across centuries. Using my translation of Coronado’s 1847 “El Tiempo” (Time), I will briefly address the challenges of recuperating the source text’s semantic registers around “raza,” and approximating the persona’s sense of the moral histories embedded in the rural frontier of the Raya.
Llorián García Flórez – “Dios y el cucho pueden mucho, pero más el cucho. Voice and manure: staying with the trouble of an uncommon rurality in Asturias”
The asturian voice “cucho” –referring to a type of traditional fertilizer made in many rural farmsteads– encompasses a range of perceptions regarding the spectral nature of rurality. Formed through an intensive blend of plant material elements and livestock excrement, the “cucho” also gives name to a whole set of scatological ambivalences, in the double sense of the word, which are constitutive of the “aurality of the public sphere” (Ochoa Gautier 2014) in post-Francoist modernity in Asturias. My contribution to this collective problematization of the sense of rurality “epistemically accompanies” (Estalella & Sánchez Criado 2020) an emergent sensibility in Asturias, where the “cucho” participates as an atribute of the sonority of the land that is colectively reclaimed by many as a form of life.
Speaker Bios:
Pepa Anastasio is professor at Hofstra University in New York, where she teaches courses on literature, gender and sexuality, and cultural studies in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, the program in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the LGBT Studies program. She is interested in cultural practices in Spain, with a focus on popular musical practices in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Luke Michael Bowe is a PhD Candidate in Spanish and Portuguese at NYU. His dissertation explores cultural representations of industry and rurality under Franco and takes Asturias as a case study to analyze regionally-specific events, discourses, and mythmaking to illuminate tensions in the broader context of Spanish nation building. He is the recipient of a 2022-2023 Fulbright Grant at the Universidad de Oviedo.
Belenish Moreno-Gil (1993) y Óscar Escudero (1992) son una pareja de post-compositores cuyas producciones trabajan en la brecha entre la tecnología y la vida, revisitando la Historia desde una perspectiva postdigital y creando obras que operen en lo que denominan como la “realidad SPAM”, en la que nos hallamos inmersos.
Llorián García Flórez was born in a small rural village situated in the mid-mountain of Asturias, where he continues to reside, Llorián García Flórez is a PhD Candidate in Music Studies and Sound at Uviéu/Oviedo University. He also actively pursues a career as a musician specializing in traditional music in Asturias. His doctoral research centers around the collaborative experiment conducted by the Nueche en Danza movement in Asturias, which aims to revitalize de tradicional dance, music and language by developing an idiosyncratic aesthetic of echolocation. Some of his inquiries regarding the relationship between music/sound and rurality have already been published in Brepols (2017), Popular Music and Society (2020) and Volume! The French Journal of Popular Music Studies (2023).
Rebecca Haidt is Professor of Spanish and Iberian Studies at The Ohio State University. Her books (Embodying Enlightenment, 1998; Seduction and Sacrilege, 2002; and Women, Work and Clothing in Eighteenth-Century Spain, 2011) and essays employ literary, historical and cultural studies methods in analysis of 18th- and 19th-century Iberian topics. Recent publications include “Solidarity, paisanaje, or amistad? Cruz’s majos and eighteenth-century laboring friendship” in Fe/Male Friends: Staging Gender and Friendship in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Spanish Literature (Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2023: 191-215) and “Singing and street cries from eighteenth-century naranjera to twentieth-century violetera: aural paradigms of gender, poverty and affect” (Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 20:3, 2019: 209-225; DOI: 10.1080/14636204.2019.1644933). Haidt will speak from her current project, a critical introduction to, and translations into English of, poems by Carolina Coronado.