GAI held a conversation with Argentine writer Agustina Bazterrica, author of acclaimed novels such as Cadáver exquisito (Tender Is the Flesh, 2017), winner of the prestigious Premio Clarín de Novela, as well as Las indignas (The Unworthy, 2023) and short story collections such as Diecinueve garras y un pájaro oscuro (Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird, 2020). Bazterrica will talk about the main topics of her work, including dystopian landscapes, gender violence, and the climate crisis in a conversation with Georgetown University professors Nicolás Campisi and Tess Renker.
This event was sponsored by the Georgetown Americas Institute and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University, the Embassy of Argentina in Washington, DC, and the Ibero-American Cultural Attachés Association. The conversation will be conducted in Spanish.
This event was a part of the Literature Festival 2024 - Ibero American Culture DC.
Featuring
Agustina Bazterrica is an author, as well as cultural manager and jury manager in various literary contests. Bazterrica has a degree in arts from the University of Buenos Aires. She is the author of the short story collection Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird (2020), and the novels Matar al niña (2013) and Tender Is the Flesh (2017), the latter of which was awarded the Clarín Novel Prize. Tender Is the Flesh established Bazterrica as a bestselling author worldwide, with translations into 30 languages and half a million copies sold in English alone. Tender Is the Flesh is currently being adapted for television. Her latest novel, The Unworthy, was published in Spanish in 2023 and received the same enthusiastic reception, affirming Bazterrica’s status as a prominent author in contemporary literature.
Nicolás Campisi is an assistant professor in the Georgetown University Department of Spanish and Portuguese who studies the relationship between literature and catastrophe in contemporary Latin America. His forthcoming book, The Return of the Contemporary: The Latin American Novel in the End Times, explores how writers represent Latin America's neoliberal apocalypse brought about by ecological disaster, socioeconomic crisis, the lingering traumas of dictatorship, and slavery's afterlives. Through a hemispheric analysis of novels in Spanish and Portuguese, the book argues that Latin American writers travel back in time to understand the incompleteness of the present and the waning of the future during our neoliberal end times. His second book project, tentatively titled Continental Ruins: The Literature of Ecohorror in Latin America, charts the emergence of new literary modes for representing the invisible and long-term violence of the climate crisis, focusing on issues such as mining, pesticide poisoning, and global pandemics. Specifically, the book theorizes the literary genre of ecohorror, which uses negative emotions such as disgust and fear to make visible the concealed forms of violence of our current climate predicament. Campisi is also interested in Latin American avant-garde writing, Indigenous literatures, and Latin American popular culture, especially the relationship between soccer and cultural production.
Tess Renker is an assistant professor in the Georgetown University Department of Spanish and Portuguese who specializes in modern and contemporary Latin American literature, film, and cultural production, with a particular emphasis on Peru and the Andes. She is especially interested in questions of indigeneity, migration, political violence, and rurality. Her first book project, Undoing the Conflict Canon: Indigeneity, Author(ity), and Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict, considers how Indigenous and rural authors respond to Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict (~19080-2000) via a rewriting of the conflict era from a decentralized, decolonial position and a rewiring of hegemonic networks of literary production, circulation, and canon formation. The book argues that the conflict—which disproportionately impacted rural and Indigenous communities—serves as an important inflection point for the theorization of Indigenous literatures of Peru and the conditions of possibility available to Indigenous authors. Her second book project, tentatively titled Radical Borders: Race, Extractive Capitalism, and Peruvian Borderlands, analyzes literature, film, performance, and visual artworks from the early 1940s that highlight the complexity of Peruvian borders, be they provincial, racial, socioeconomic, linguistic, etc. The project not only seeks to theorize Peru as borderland but to explore what border studies might gain from engaging with the Peruvian context and its long history of internal migration.