Upcoming Events

“Browning Avant La Lettre: Punjabi-Mexican Relationality in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands” analyzes archival materials and literary fiction to challenge conventional understandings of the so-called “browning of America,” a phrase used to describe the demographic growth of Asian and Latin American immigrant populations in the United States post 1965, as a distinctly mid 20th century phenomenon. This talk draws on sociological studies of interethnic relations, family testimony, and narrative fiction to challenge nation-state frameworks of racial classification and expand our understanding of civic belonging against a backdrop of anti-miscegenation laws from 1850 to 1965. 

Natalia Reyes is the Yoonmee Chang Dissertation Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation analyzes narratives of interracial romance to examine how ideas of “brownness” shape conceptions of race and time in literature across the Americas in the 19th and 20th centuries.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Cinema & Media Studies.

Latitudes has teamed up with the Lightbox Film Center to host a post-screening conversation with Patrick Wang (In the Family, A Bread Factory). 

Lightbox Film Center will be screening Wang's newest film A. Rimbaud on November 4 at Bok Auditorium (800 Mifflin St, Philadelphia), starting at 7 p.m. Following that screening, we at Lats will be moderating a post-screening conversation. 

Those in the Lats circle can receive free tickets to the screening (please reach out to Eddy Wang (eddywang@sas.upenn.edu) if you'd like a ticket or two — he can add you to the guest list). 

Patrick Wang is a film director, writer, actor, and economist. His first feature In the Family was declared "an indie masterpiece" by Roger Ebert, and his earnestly hilarious A Bread Factory was described by Justin Chang as a "prickly humanist triumph . . . meticulously handcrafted in every respect." A. Rimbaud is his first film in 8 years: it is about the life of Arthur Rimbaud (played by Blake Draper), as well as the interstices of memory, colonialism, poetry, form, and the multiphonic representations of life-as-stage (and life-stage). 

Please join ResVic on Thursday, November 5 for a talk from Wendy Anne Lee, Associate Professor of English at NYU, entitled “The Way of the Janeite." Wendy writes:

This talk draws from my current project about devoted, lifelong, continuous re-readers of the writings of Jane Austen. To a treasury of historical and material studies of Janeite “cults and cultures,” Janeite memoirs about “living with” and “growing older” with their “divine” and “only author,” and adaptations and fan fictions galore, I offer a philosophical meditation. My theory of Janeism as a devotional practice that allows us to reckon with the end of life draws on my background as an Enlightenment scholar, palliative care doula, and dedicated Janeite. My overarching claim is that Austen’s narrative prose—what critics have long understood as a singular achievement in the history of literature—can become a holding structure for consciousness (memory, emotion, identity) over time. Like other Scriptures, Austen’s oeuvre offers a total capture of experience (all possible meaning is here). An inexhaustible source of solace and encounter, its textual constellation extends the promise of existential relief, otherworldly grace, and perpetual play. 

Refreshments will be served. We hope to see you there!

Wendy Anne Lee (NYU) is a literary theorist engaged in questions concerning narrative and emotion. Her work focuses on Enlightenment texts of philosophy and literature and is invested in how their granular explications of the passions can expand our understanding of consciousness and psychic life. She is the author of Failures of Feeling: Insensibility and the Novel and is currently at work on a project entitled Jane Austen and the End of Life, which draws from her experiences as a palliative care doula and Janeite.

As grad students, we are often asked what we study—less often are we asked how.

In this panel, four Penn English faculty members (Caz Batten, David Eng, Dagmawi Woubshet, and Chi-ming Yang) will share their own experiences with method. Through their conversation, we will explore a variety of methods in literary study and consider what each affords us as scholars.

There will be ample time for questions from the audience.

Participants:

Caz Batten, Assistant Professor of English

David Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor of English

Dagmawi Woubshet, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Associate Professor of English

Chi-ming Yang, Professor of English

Please join us to celebrate the publication of Big American Writer: The Bilingual Jack Kerouac by Professor Jean-Christophe Cloutier, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature here at Penn.

JC will be joined in conversation with Penn’s own corine labridy, translator and assistant professor in French and Francophone Studies in the Francophone, Italian and Germanic Studies Department at Penn.