Paul Merchant, Associate Professor in Latin American Film and Visual Culture, University of Bristol will virtually present his current research in this third installment of the lecture series sponsored by the CLALS Interdisciplinary Research Cluster (IRÇ) "Elemental Thinking: Troubling States of Matter in the Americas." This IRC is led by Penn professors Kristina Lyons (Anthropology) and Jon Hawkings (Environmental Sciences) in collaboration with other professors and graduate students across Penn’s schools and partners from Latin America and the U.S. 

Dr. Merchant will present:

The Ocean to Come: Pacific Futures in Chilean and Peruvian Culture

What can a view from, or even through, the Pacific Ocean reveal about Chilean and Peruvian culture? Addressing a corpus that ranges from the mid-twentieth century to the present, my current book project argues that a Pacific perspective makes it possible to see how culture can help build senses of community both among humans and between humans and the nonhuman environment. In doing so, it shows how in the literature, film and visual arts of both countries, the Pacific has been and continues to be a space for experimentation with possible futures. The project thus moves beyond the frequent critical categorization of Peru as “Andean” and of Chile as belonging to the “Southern Cone,” showing instead shared environmental and social challenges, and common conceptions of how they might be tackled. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the project, and sketch out the argument that the aesthetic characteristics of much contemporary artistic production in Chile and Peru, which I describe as constituting an “ecological avant-garde,” paradoxically engaged in simultaneous processes of rupture and immersion, respond to a tradition that can be traced through poetry and other art forms in both countries.