Geographies of Risk
September 23-24, 2010
Click on titles to see abstracts
Thursday, September 23
9:00 – 9:30 am - Welcoming remarks
Silvina Montrul, Head, SIP
Diane Musumeci, Associate Dean, LAS
Mariselle Meléndez, Associate Professor and Associate Head, SIP
Alvan Bregman, Associate Professor, Rare Book & Manuscript Library
LOCATION: The Rare Book and Manuscript Library
346 Main Library, 1408 West Gregory Drive, Urbana
9:45 – 11:00 am - PANEL I. Risky Animals and Human Management
LOCATION: The Rare Book and Manuscript Library
346 Main Library, 1408 West Gregory Drive, Urbana
CHAIR: Javier Irigoyen-García (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
1. Peggy McCracken (University of Michigan).
“Risk and the Geography of Skin”
This paper will focus on the risks (and opportunities) associated with the representation of totemic animals as ancestors in medieval literature and, in particular, in the swan knights stories connected to Godefroy de Bouillon’s lineage. Focusing on the perils and the possibilities represented in the story of animal ancestry, Peggy McCracken will investigate the risks of embodiment in medieval crusade narratives that recount the founding of the western kingdom of Jerusalem under its first king, Godefroy de Bouillon. In particular, she will question the relationship between two origin stories, the account of Godefroy’s animal ancestor and the narrative of the founding of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in order, first, to argue that political and politicized representations of embodiment as a figure of authority are both confirmed and threatened by the presence of the animal; second, to map the ways in which embodiment and geography intersect in this story of the founding of an empire; and finally, to investigate the ways in which the texts recognize this risks of animal embodiment and attempt to manage them through narrative appeals to both the marvelous and the miraculous.
2. Eleonora Stoppino (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
“Animality and Prophylaxis in Medieval Italian Literature”
This paper is part of a larger project that explores medieval animals through the categories of contagion and prophylaxis. I argue that the spreading of illnesses, such as the plague that swept Europe in the middle of the 14th century, is a valuable pressure point for the analysis of the boundary between human and nonhuman. In the medieval and early modern period, constructions of animality show attempts, often struggles, to establish a boundary between the human and the nonhuman. Language, clothing, education, cooking practices and mating customs are only a few of the distinguishing factors in this process. In Boccaccio’s Decameron, for example, the issue of animality takes immediately center stage, and it is associated with constructions of prophylaxis and contagion on one side, and femininity on the other. In the Introduction to the collection, the plague shatters the fixed boundary that prevents contagion between humans and animals. Across the topographical divide between city and countryside, humans and nonhumans trade places in the hierarchy of the living. The animal risk in the Decameron, however, is not just the threat of contagion or of role reversal, but the possibility that the distinction itself between human and nonhuman be lost.
3. Marcia Stephenson (Purdue University)
“Risk Management in the Southern Andes: The Case of Charles Ledger’s Alpacas at Laguna Blanca, 1857-1858”
This paper examines events that took place during the year that Englishman Charles Ledger spent at Laguna Blanca, Argentina, with his contraband herd of alpacas and llamas and indigenous shepherds. Having escaped capture by the Bolivian authorities, Ledger was en route through northern Argentina with plans of eventually crossing over into Chile and setting sail for Australia with the animals. His decision to spend an extended period of time in Laguna Blanca was based primarily on the need to replenish the herd of alpacas which had been decimated due to an unfortunate accident. He also hoped to be able to capture and domesticate young vicuñas, prized for their fine fiber, and to bring them along with the other animals. Information about these events comes from publications of portions of Ledger’s now-lost diary and from a series of watercolors and pencil drawings depicting daily life at Laguna Blanca by someone known only as “Santiago Savage.” Ledger’s account and Savages’s paintings foreground the ever-present concern of risk management as Laguna Blanca was transformed into an unexpected contact zone for heterogeneous associations unfolding around animal care and breeding practices. Combining indigenous and western knowledge technologies, these practices included training llama wet-nurses to adopt young vicuñas and implementing the controlled hybridization of llamas and alpacas. Indigenous herders and English entrepreneurs worked together to create a large flock of Andean camelids for export and, ultimately, it was hoped, for profit. Drawing from Sarah Whatmore’s work, I argue that Laguna Blanca became a complex site where the animals were literally being refashioned or rebred for circulation in new transnational networks of people, places and economies.
11:00 – 11:15 am – Coffee Break
11:15 am – 12:30 pm - PANEL II. Biopolitics of Risk
This session is co-sponsored by the Social Dimensions of Environmental Policy (SDEP), an initiative of the Department of Geography, School of Earth, Society and Environment, and Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
LOCATION: Lucy Ellis Lounge, Foreign Languages Building, room 1080,
707 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana
CHAIR: Mariselle Meléndez (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
1. Charles F. Walker (University of California - Davis)
“Fear and Risks in the Viceroyalty of Peru: Reactions to Earthquakes and Revolutions”
Reactions to the massive 1746 earthquake-tsunami in coastal Peru melded supernatural, natural, and social explanations. As in other early modern cases, people associated God’s wrath, the earth, and people’s sinfulness or wanton way, not seeing them as separate categories or explanations. The earth served as a mediator or agent of divine anger, which reacted to or reflected earthly actives. In this case, authorities blamed a variety of Lima’s inhabitants, stressing its “independent” women but also pointing fingers at the ostentatious upper classes, the rich church, and the unruly dark-skinned (Indian and black) lower classes. In the end, everyone was at fault. This paper examines how different groups understand the earthquake, particularly the relationship between God, the earth itself, and social customs. It will also use as a point of comparison the massive uprising that spread through the southern Andes thirty years later, the Tupac Amaru uprising (1780-1783). This will allow us to compare and contrast a “natural disaster” and a “social movement,” categories that were understood in surprisingly similar ways. It will also permit comparisons between understandings of coastal Lima and Andean Cuzco, Tupac Amaru’s base.
2. Kim Rygiel (Wilfrid Laurier University)
“Mobile Bodies, Risky Subjects and the Securitized Citizen: Citizenship as Biopolitics”
Michel Foucault argued that in the nineteenth century there emerged a new form of power, which he called biopower, aimed at governing populations through the management and administration over life itself, that is, over the various aspects of individuals and populations as living and dying beings. Within this context, the emergence of modern citizenship, commonly understood as a legal institution and status of membership in a political community (most often the nation-state), can also be conceptualized as a form of biopolitical government. Citizenship as biopolitics involves the management of life through the construction and regulation of populations, including desirable and undesirable citizen, non-citizen and abject populations. Within the recent period of heightened globalization and securitization, industrialized countries have implemented more restrictive border controls to control global mobility. These border controls employ biometric, risk-profiling and data mining technologies to control the movement of populations by dividing and classifying individuals into “low” and “high” risk travelers, categories of mobile subjects which are also highly gendered, racialized, and class-based. These categories of mobile subjects can then be managed more efficiently according to a regime of differential mobility rights. As a result of these new ways of governing, we are witnessing the emergence of a more exclusionary mobility regime that deepens inequality along racialized, gendered, and classed lines and which recasts the meaning of what it means to be a citizen towards more technocratic and depoliticized definitions of the citizen.
3. Emanuel Rota (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
“Risking Lives to Protect Life: Community, State and Life in the Italian Political Tradition”
From Machiavelli to Agamben and Negri, the notion of risk has been central in the Italian political tradition. The weakness of the Italian nation-state has forced the Italian political elites to constantly reimagine the “geography of risk management” for the protection of the Italian or international community. The Italian Nation State has been a political laboratory where notions of emergency and imminent risk have been the central source of legitimation for the Italian state and the political order that it guarantees. This paper analyzes how the Italian philosophical tradition has reacted to the representation of a constant life threatening risk for the Italian community and its political organizations.
12:30 – 1:45 pm - Lunch Break
2:00 – 3:00 pm - KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Gabriela Nouzeilles (Princeton University)
“Living on the Edge: Geographies of Risk in Postmodern Travel”
Following Foucault's convoluted, multilayered notion of heterotopia, this lecture explores the role of exceptional nature–deserts, high mountains, oceans, usually located in the margins of the developed world–as a privileged stage on which alternative travelers can experience extreme forms of physical, affective, and intellectual states of being. These “geographies of risk” are based on antimodern fictions of flight, both echoed and produced by literature, photography, and film. The presentation begins with an overview of the political and cultural views of exceptional landscapes in Latin America and other regions of the world, beginning in the late nineteenth century, and then proceeds to focus on the most recent developments of traveling desire and iconographic passion toward extreme natural landscapes (Patagonia and the Amazon, among many others), in the context of the political, economic, scientific, aesthetic, and cultural debates on the vanishing of nature as such.
Respondent: Ericka Beckman (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
LOCATION: Lucy Ellis Lounge, Foreign Languages Building, room 1080,
707 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana
3:00 – 3:30 pm - Coffee Break
3:30 – 4:45 pm - PANEL III. The Eye at Risk
LOCATION: Lucy Ellis Lounge, Foreign Languages Building, room 1080, South Mathews Avenue, Urbana
CHAIR: Robert Rushing (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
1. Magali Carrera(University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth)
“From Risky Seeing to Controlled Looking: Shifting Visual Culture Practices in Eighteenth-Century New Spain”
In 1781, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Carlos was established in Mexico City. The late-eighteenth century painting, Retrato de Matías de Gálvez certifies that the Academy established new comprehensive educational and iconographic programs for artistic production. There, under the steady hand of Viceroy Gálvez, two shoeless, unkempt and dark-skinned boys, who hold paper and a canvas/panel and represent untutored artisans, appear perplexed as they look to each other and point in opposite directions. In dramatic contrast to these artisans, the two well-dressed young men seated behind them sketch a classical sculpture, with the figure on the far right raising his pen/drawing tool, to assess the proportions of the sculpture in order to draw it accurately. More than an artistic technique, however, this simple measuring gesture by the artist is critical as it marks new scopic methodologies: academic art requires a different way of looking, one that measures and assesses through careful observation what conforms to standardized practices, in contrast to the artisans’ risky (and ultimately unproductive) behaviors. The institutionalization of art education practices raises questions about the assessment of visual risk in eighteenth-century New Spain: Why was the artisans’ mode of seeing deemed unacceptable looking? What was it about artisan sight that provoked interrogation and a need to renovate the practices of art production? More than a reform-driven shift in artistic style, eighteenth-century visual production may be understood as embedded in tensions between existing and emerging scopic regimes, the manifestation of new cultural and political imperatives to see differently.
2. Andrea Goulet (University of Pennsylvania)
“Losing Your Mind Through Your Eye: Visual Hallucination as a Game of Risk in the French Fin-de-Siècle”
Nineteenth-century Paris is a literary site of speculation and ubiquitous financial risk. From the Balzacian arriviste who gambles a tailor-made suit against the prospect of a rich marriage to the declining aristocrats who play whist in Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Diaboliques, heroes’ fortunes rise and fall with the turn of a new-economy Wheel of Fate. But as the century shifted away from positivist realism and toward a confrontation with the forces of the occult, the fantastic genre imagined a game of risk with higher stakes for the seeing self — not just wealth or social standing, but one’s fundamental sanity. Authors like Guy de Maupassant and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam placed their protagonists between two epistemological options: refuse the supernatural or believe in one’s visions and risk incarceration in an asylum for les aliénés, the insane. This paper will use theories of the fantastic to study texts that question the reality of visual hallucinations, situating epistemological risks and gains in the observer’s eye. It will pay particular attention to the ways in which Pasteurian theories of infection combined with France’s fin-de-siècle colonial status to locate the risk of visual and mental “infection” in exotic, foreign locales.
3. Julián Gutiérrez-Albilla (University of Southern California)
“Risks of Interpretation: filming Trauma and Memory in Documentary Film”
The aim of this paper is to explore the risk of engaging, both phenomenologically and cognitively, with traumatic memories, associated with the experience of war and exile, as represented in Jaime Camino’s documentary Los niños de Rusia (2001). My goal is to explore the way in which this documentary film functions as a mode of witnessing, thereby mediating between subjective and collective experiences and discourses. My paper will also offer a reflection on the risks of interpretation, by exploring how Camino’s documentary integrates the politics of the representation of external references and the poetics of the representation of inner states. In combining those two types of references, the documentary is able to evoke the traumatic memories of the past by provoking a reverberation of those effects in our subjectivities and bodies without making us succumb to an over-identification with the other’s suffering. Such an over-identification with the other’s suffering runs the risk of adopting an ineffective witnessing position. My paper considers the way in which we engage in meaning production through perception and cognition, as well as through affect and sensation.
Friday, September 24
8:30 – 9:00 am – Coffee
9:00- 10.30 am - PANEL IV. Risk and the Realms of the Literary
LOCATION: Lucy Ellis Lounge, Foreign Languages Building, room 1080,
707 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana
CHAIR: Dara E. Goldman (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
1. Elaine Freedgood (New York University)
“Realist Safety”
Realistic fiction-the fiction of the nineteenth century-allows for readers to choose between history and fiction. Because the nineteenth-century novel mingles the fictional and referential-fictional characters walk down actual streets, vote for historical prime ministers, read about Waterloo and refer to the US Civil War and so on-it allows the reader to choose between history and fiction. Any referent can always be re-fictionalized at the end of the reading experience, and thus the risks of history, the dangers of empire, the horrors of industrialization, the threat of expansion or contraction, the anger of the laboring class or colonized people can all be returned to the ontological realm of the fictional during or after the reading experience. Or not. The choice is up to the reader, who can titrate their own tolerance for the risk of what has happened and what may yet happen. Fiction thus creates the experience of, and the cognitive process of ontological imperialism wherein the reader, the world of the text, and the world to which the text refers may be moved in and out of various existential compartments at will and may even exist in two or more compartments at the same time. In this paper I will discuss several imperial and (apparently) domestic novels to demonstrate the ways in which the nineteenth-century novel in its form, in its textual processes, and in its content provide readers with a peculiarly "realist" sense of safety: a fictional safety with real consequences.
2. Wail Hassan (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
“Risky Translations”
This paper focuses on the cultural-linguistic politics of reception that have led Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif to refrain from translating some of her English-language works into Arabic. Herself a practiced translator (of her own and of others’ works), Soueif’s two novels and two short story collections to date reflect an ongoing engagement with the politics of literary and cultural translation. As her career as writer and translator has unfolded in two languages, Soueif has come to appreciate the freedoms and restrictions that each context affords or imposes, and the necessity of negotiating different kinds of reader expectations and culture-specific conditions of reception, each fraught with its own risks.
3. José M. Rodríguez-García (Duke University)
“Narratives of Risk and Crises of the State in La Virgen de los Sicarios”
Fernando Vallejo’s acclaimed novel La Virgen de los Sicarios (1994) constitutes a daring attempt at rethinking in narrative terms the eclipse of Colombia’s liberal-democratic institutions in the months in 1992-1993, when drug lord Pablo Escobar was on the run. The novel’s unreliable external narrator enacts a regime of relentless verbal violence, in which the street jargon of gunmen contaminates the parlance of grammarians. The novel’s protagonist-narrator and his unemployed hitman-lovers expose themselves and their sovereign yet acephalous community to the likelihood of being gunned down each time they set foot on the street. This imminent risk becomes the story’s counterpart to the literary risk inherent in writing a new “national novel” in a “national language”– a novel, in any case, about a failed national community, a potentially failed state, and the impossibility of reducing regional dialects and idiolects to a national standard. The question that I will attempt to answer at the close of my paper is whether civil society’s territorial and moral limits can be conquered afresh from the experience of anti-statist violence, the mutual contamination of lettered and unlettered speech, and the pressures that liminal, illegally built spaces put on the legal city.
4. Antonio Luciano Tosta (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
“Theorizing Risk in O Presidente Negro”
Monteiro Lobato's 1926 novel O Presidente Negro depicts a future US presidential race between a woman, an African-American man, and a white man. Lobato's novel brings a complex and insightful portrait, not only of race, but also of gender relations in American society viewed through a uniquely Brazilian prism. Through the genre of science-fiction, the plot of the novel calls attention to the risks of the advancement of science, the extremism of racial ideologies, and even of interpreting and translating another culture into one’s own. More importantly, the novel’s very premise articulates a transmerican fear of black power, rooted in slavery. Lobato approaches risk geographically and inter-nationally by suggesting that the future in these American nations is intimidating and risky, as it poses a threat to many of society’s esteemed values. In setting the novel in the US and in the future, the author deflects Brazilian social conflicts onto another time and space.
10:30 – 11:00 pm - Coffee Break
11:00– 12:15 pm - PANEL V. Transnationalism and the Conceptualization of Risk
LOCATION: Lucy Ellis Lounge, Foreign Languages Building, room 1080,
707 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana
CHAIR: L. Elena Delgado (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
1. Joseba Zulaika (University of Nevada - Reno)
“When Non-Risk becomes Risky: The Case of Terrorism Envy”
This paper will examine how non-terror can become a terrorism problem and how non-risk becomes ideologically risky, while at the same time real threats go undetected. My argument will be built on examples such as the recent ban of minarets in Switzerland, the prohibition to wear a burka in France and Holland, the passage of terrorism legislation in various European countries in which acts of terrorism have not been carried out, as well as the recent history of counterterrorism in the United States. The international prominence gained by the Spanish prime minister Aznar due to his alliance with the worldwide “war on terror” declared by the Bush administration shows the political capital attached to terrorist risk. Countries may act as if afflicted by a case of “terrorism envy” since non-risk may be perceived as political irrelevance. The paper will argue that the dynamics of risk/non-risk should be seen in the cultural context of taboo while displaying the qualities of the Lacanian edge: a self-generating process that simultaneously links and separates the risk communities from the mainstream society in a self-fulfilling relationship constituted by its very impossibility.
2. Maxine L. Margolis (University of Florida)
“A Landscape of Risk: Brazilian Immigrants in the United States”
Since the attacks of September 11, 2001 the risks of being an undocumented immigrant in the United States have increased dramatically. The federal government and some state governments enacted a series of measures designed to clamp down on undocumented immigration, citing the fact that most of the planes’ hijackers were themselves in the country illegally. These measures included making it more difficult for would-be travelers to the U.S. to obtain visas, carefully scrutinizing foreigners at gateways upon entry into the U.S., strengthening patrols along the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada borders, increasing the deportation of undocumented foreigners, and making it harder for immigrants to obtain drivers licenses and other legal documents. Then, too, anti-immigrant ideology and actions burgeoned following the attacks and fear and uncertainty swept through many immigrant communities. I will detail the impact of these changes by citing the lived experience of Brazilian immigrants—both potential and actual—in the United States.
3. Michael Ugarte (University of Missouri-Columbia)
“Exile, Emigration and Immigration: Dangerously Wandering Through the Age of Globalization”
What are the common points and distinctions between exile and emigration? How does free will and risk-taking play into these differences? Often the main distinction emerges from a difference in perspective (or subject position), but there are other issues involved that have to do as much with politics as with the ways we reconstruct the experiences of exile and
emigration. I want to shed light on these questions by offering both an intellectual and a personal exploration of (relatively) recent emigration-exile from Africa to Spain and by reading certain texts (Spanish and non-Spanish) that interrogate the ways in which exile and emigration overlap.
12:15 – 1:30 pm – Lunch Break
2:15 – 3:15 pm - KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Iain Wilkinson (University of Kent)
“The Confine of Risk: Towards the Recovery of Social Understanding”
Over the last twenty years the concept of risk has been widely adopted as a synonym for ‘social problems’ and many now understand us to be living in a ‘risk society’. The same period has also witnessed an exponential growth of risk perception studies as social scientists have ventured to explain how people are liable to think about and act in a world of imminent danger. Many now hold that by studying the language of risk and practices of risk assessment we stand to unmask the definitive character of modern societies and contemporary modes of self-understanding. In this presentation I review the events and processes that have contributed to the rise of risk analysis and debate. I aim to be particularly attentive to the political values and ethical standpoints that moderate the ways in which the language of risk is used to depict social life. I examine the ideological appeal of the concept of risk, and highlight the forms of sociological understanding that are diminished or denied when risk is privileged as a unit of analysis and social explanation. In conclusion I outline alternatives to ‘thinking with risk’ that hold the potential for nurturing more analytically creative and emancipatory forms of cultural inquiry.
Respondent: Jesse Ribot (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
3:15 – 3:30 pm – Regarding Risk
L. Elena Delgado(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
LOCATION: Lucy Ellis Lounge, Foreign Languages Building, room 1080,
707 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana