_________________________________________REMINDER____________________________________________
CMAS invites you to our 2018 Distinguished Speaker Ramón Saldívar on Thursday, April 19. There will be a reception to follow. Please see details below.
ABOUT THE TALK
A host of writers are exploring the post-postmodern, post-Civil Rights moment in American racial formations. I wish to make the case that these works represent a distinctive turn in the history of contemporary American ethnic and general
fiction. In doing so, they share four distinctive features, which in the aggregate constitute a new aesthetic that I term
Speculative Realism.
Using the tools of traditional literary analysis plus elements drawn from the digital humanities, I wish to account for these four aspects common to the writings of contemporary ethnic writers and the defining
aesthetic that results from the new racial imaginaries being forged around us.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
RAMÓN SALDÍVAR, professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Hoagland Family Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, was awarded the National
Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2012.
He is Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Studies, and has served as Chair of the Department of English and the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Since 2012, Professor Saldivar has served as the Burke Family
Director of the Bing Overseas Studies Program at Stanford. He has also served as the Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity. His teaching and research focus on the areas of literary criticism and literary theory, the history of
the novel, 19th, 20th and 21st century literary studies, cultural studies, issues concerning transnationalism and globalization, and U.S. Latino and Latina Studies.
He is the author and editor of four books and numerous other scholarly publications. In 2006, he was awarded the Modern Language Association Prize in US Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and
Cultural Studies for his book, The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (Duke, 2006). He is currently working on a new project, tentatively titled “The Racial Imaginary: Speculative Realism and Historical Fantasy
in Contemporary American Fiction.”
In March 2013, President Obama appointed him to a six -year term on the National Council on the Humanities.