Date/Time
Date(s) - November 17, 2022
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Location
El Centro
Categories
“In this talk Janzen will draw on her recent book, Unlawful Violence (Vanderbilt 2022) to discuss the situation many Central American migrants face in Mexico. She will talk about efforts to improve conditions for migrants, ranging from human rights laws, to activist work, and use Nadia Villafuerte’s short stories to illuminate the situation. Villafuerte’s short stories discuss sex work, sexualized violence, and physical injuries that migrants incur as they attempt to cross Mexico. Janzen will talk about the tension between the rights migrants are granted under Mexican law and this reality, and use some of Villafuerte’s public speaking to think through possibilities for change”
Rebecca Janzen is McCausland Fellow and Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. She is a scholar of gender, disability and religious studies in Mexican literature and culture whose research focuses on excluded populations in Mexico. Her first book, The National Body in Mexican Literature: Collective Challenges to Biopolitical Control (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015), explored images of disability and illness in 20th century texts. Her second book, Liminal Sovereignty: Mennonites and Mormons in Mexican Culture (SUNY, 2018), focused on religious minorities. Unholy Trinity: State, Church and Film in Mexico (SUNY, 2021) deals with film and religion in Mexico, and Unlawful Violence: Law and Cultural Production in 21st Century Mexico (Vanderbilt, 2022), is about human rights, law, and literature. The Plett Foundation, the Kreider Fellowship at Elizabethtown College, the C Henry Smith Peace Trust and the Newberry library in Chicago have supported her research.