7:00 p.m.

Americas Society
680 Park Avenue
New York

Share

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, by Federico de Madrazo. (Image: Wikicommons)

Adriana Méndez Rodenas on Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda

Americas Society welcomes Dr. Adriana Méndez-Rodenas to open the Literature Department's fall season.

7:00 p.m.

Americas Society
680 Park Avenue
New York

Share

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, by Federico de Madrazo. (Image: Wikicommons)

Overview

Online registration is now closed. Members may arrive prior to the event and pick up their tickets, and non-members can pay at the door. Email jnegroni@as-coa.org for questions.

The Fall 2014 Literature season opens with a presentation by Dr. Adriana Méndez Rodenas (University of Iowa), who will speak on the great Romantic Cuban poet Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. Méndez’s lecture and visual presentation, entitled “Picturing Cuba: Romantic Ecology in Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841),” will explore the role of tropical nature in the author’s renowned anti-slavery novel. Her presentation will also highlight the novel’s broader context and the contemporary relevance of Gómez de Avellaneda’s life and work. The event celebrates the two-hundredth anniversary of the writer’s birth. Co-presented with the Cuban Cultural Center of New York.

We thank the following additional institutions for helping publicize this event: Columbia University; the Consulate General of Argentina in New York; the Hispanic New York Project; Hunter College, CUNY; InterAmericas®; The International Literary Quarterly; McNally Jackson Books; New York University; The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church; The 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center; University of Houston; and Words Without Borders.

This program will be held in English.

“Adriana Méndez Rodenas is to be credited for having recovered, single-handedly, an all but forgotten Cuban nineteenth-century figure. Her book on Merlin is an illuminating reflection in which the discourses of nation-formation, cultural translation, and gender identity fruitfully intersect.” —Sylvia Molloy, New York University

Event Information: Jose Negroni | jnegroni@as-coa.org | 1-212-277-8353
Press Inquiries: Adriana La Rotta | alarotta@as-coa.org | 1-212-277-8384


Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814-1873) was a nineteenth-century Cuban writer, born to a Spanish aristocrat and a Cuban mother in Puerto Príncipe (present-day Camagüey), who wrote poetry, novels, and plays, as well as an autobiography. She achieved notoriety in Madrid during the 1840s and 1850s, becoming a key figure in the Spanish Romantic movement. Her novel Dos mujeres (1842-1843) exposed women’s social conditions under patriarchy, anticipating feminist awareness in a changing world. Her poetry and dramatic works, which were influenced by major French, English, and Spanish authors of her day, reflected her often dramatic life experiences—including relocating from Cuba to Spain, and stormy love affairs with Ignacio de Cepeda and the Sevillean poet Gabriel García Tassura. In an age of strict gender roles, Gómez de Avellaneda dared to step out of traditional roles: she married twice and maintained a fierce independence in a male-dominated society. In 1859, Gómez de Avellaneda returned to Cuba with her husband, Domingo Verdugo, a representative of the Spanish cortes, when she reclaimed her right to be considered a full-fledged Cuban writer. She returned to Spain in 1864, and died in Madrid in 1873. Among her best-known poems is “Al partir” (1836), a sonnet about the poet’s love for Cuba as she is leaving it. Her novel Sab, the first Cuban anti-slavery novel, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, voices a literary protest against that institution. In its time it was banned in Cuba—considered scandalous because of its treatment of interracial love and societal conflict—but today is considered a classic of Cuban literature.

Adriana Méndez Rodenas is Professor of Latin American literature at the University of Iowa. She has published amply in the field of travel writing, including Gender and Nationalism in Colonial Cuba—The Travels of Santa Cruz y Montalvo, Condesa de Merlin (1998), and a critical edition of Mercedes Merlin’s Viaje a la Habana (2009). Her book Transatlantic Pilgrims: Women Travelers to Nineteenth-Century Latin America was released in 2013 by Bucknell University Press. In 2012, she guest-edited Review 84 (Women Travelers to Latin America).