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.
Urayoán Noelis a poet, performer, scholar, and translator who is currently an Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Albany and Visiting Assistant Professor of English at NYU. His books include the poetry collections Kool Logic/La lógica kool(Bilingual Press, 2005), Boringkén (Ediciones Callejón/La Tertulia, Puerto Rico, 2008), Hi-Density Politics (BlazeVOX, 2010), and Los días porosos (Catafixia Editorial, Guatemala, 2012), and the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa Press, forthcoming). His other works include the performance DVD Kool Logic Sessions (Bilingual Press, 2005, with Monxo López), the multimedia project The Edgemere Letters (2011, with Martha Clippinger), and, as translator, the chapbooks ILUSOS by Edwin Torres (Atarraya Cartonera, Puerto Rico, 2010) and Belleza y Felicidad (Belladonna, 2005). He has been a fellow of CantoMundo, the Bronx Council on the Arts, and the Ford Foundation, andhis creative and critical writings have appeared in Latino Studies, Contemporary Literature, Small Axe, Bomb,Fence, and in numerous national and international anthologies. Originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, Urayoán Noel earned his B.A. from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, his M.A. from Stanford, and his Ph.D. from NYU. He lives in the Bronx.
Sponsored by LASER, Student Life Multicultural Center, and the Dept. of Spanish & Portuguese Iberian and Latin American Colloquium
