7:00 p.m.

Americas Society
680 Park Avenue
New York

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Women Travelers Symposium: Launch of Review 84 (webcast available)

Americas Society Literature Director Daniel Shapiro and guest editor Adriana Méndez Rodenas launched the latest issue of Americas Society's literary journal, featuring works on women travelers in Latin America.

7:00 p.m.

Americas Society
680 Park Avenue
New York

Share

Overview

This launch of the women travelers in Latin America issue of the Society’s acclaimed journal featured comments by editor Daniel Shapiro and guest editor Adriana Méndez Rodenas. The event featured readings by authors Carlos Franz, Pola Oloixarac, and Michael Schuessler, and translator Jessica Ernst Powell, who read from their respective texts in Review 84. The speakers touched on historical figures, travel in the Americas, and the notion of the sublime. The launch included commentary by special guest Hilda Benítez, who spoke about the novel Woman in Battle Dress, by her late husband, Cuban author Antonio Benítez Rojo. This launch was conducted in English and Spanish. Copies of Review 84 were available for sale at the launch.

The symposium opened on May 16 with a panel discussion on four pioneering women travelers with scholars Claire Emille Martin, Vanesa Miseres, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Adela Pineda Franco, moderated by Méndez Rodenas. The symposium continued on May 17 with a keynote address by Méndez Rodenas.

Review 84, guest-edited by Méndez Rodenas, covers seminal women travelers in Latin America such as Flora Tristan, the French-Peruvian writer and social activist, as well as contemporary writers who address the theme of travel. Scholarly contributions include essays by critics on Tristan; on writer, artist, and ecologist Maria Sibylla Merian, who traveled to Suriname in 1699 to research and document insects and flora; on Victorian Scotswoman Lady Florence Dixie, who wrote about her adventures in Patagonia; and on Countess Paula Kollonitz, the lady-in-waiting to Empress Carlota, during Maximilian’s ill-fated reign in Mexico. The essays are complemented by illuminating texts by the travelers themselves. Other contributions include fiction by modern and contemporary writers, including the late Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Argentine novelist Pola Oloixarac, Mexico-based U.S. author Michael Schuessler, and Chilean writer Carlos Franz. The issue also features an essay by art critic Alicia Lubowski on the influence of Humboldt on women traveler-artists and includes reviews of new titles in translation by Latin American and Caribbean writers.
 

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Antonio Benítez Rojo (Havana, 1931-Amherst, MA, 2005) is widely considered among the most significant Cuban authors of his generation. An essayist, novelist, short story and screenplay writer, his work has been translated into nine languages and included in more than fifty anthologies. Benítez Rojo's final novel, Mujer en traje de batalla (Woman in Battle Dress, translated by Jessica Powell, forthcoming), was first published in 2001 by Alfaguara.

Hilda Benítez is a senior lecturer in Spanish, Emerita at Amherst College.

Carlos Franz is the author of four novels, including El desierto (2005; The Absent Sea, 2011), which addresses the issue of the disappeared in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship. His text in Review 84 is an excerpt from The Nature of Love, a novel-in-progress that explores the relationship between naturalist Charles Darwin and painter Johann Rugendas.

Jessica Ernst Powell received a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship for her work on Antonio Benítez Rojo’s novel, Woman in Battle Dress, which is presented in Review 84.

Adriana Méndez Rodenas is a professor of Latin American literature at the University of Iowa. She is currently a Fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. Her book Transatlantic Pilgrims: Women Travelers to Nineteenth-Century Latin America is forthcoming from Bucknell University Press.

Pola Oloixarac is a fiction writer and essayist. Her debut novel, Las teorías salvajes (The Wild Theories), has been translated into various languages. Her fiction was included in the 2010 collection Granta: The Best of Young Spanish Novelists. She is currently at work on a novel entitled A History of Venus in the Tropics, which has been excerpted in Review 84.

Michael K. Schuessler is a professor in the Department of Humanities at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Cuajimalpa, in Mexico City. His text in Review 84 is an excerpt from a novel, An American Princess: The Life and Times of Agnes Elisabeth Winona Leclerq Joy, Princess Salm-Salm, a fellow-traveler to Maximilian’s court in Mexico.

Boston University, Romance Languages and Romance Studies; California State University, Long Beach, Romance, German, Russian, Languages/Literatures; Columbia University, Department of Spanish & Portuguese; Cuban Cultural Center of New York; InterAmericas®; the Free University of Berlin; Mexican Cultural Institute of New York; New York University/King Juan Carlos Center; the University of Buenos Aires-Conicet; the University of Chile; the University of Essex, Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies; the University of Iowa, Spanish & Portuguese/Division of World Languages, Literatures, & Cultures; the University of Notre Dame, Romance Languages and Literatures; and Vassar College, Department of Hispanic Studies.