Movement as Survival

The Department of Central American and Transborder Studies presents, Movement as Survival: Afro-Caribbean Migrant Identities, with Valeria Grinberg Pla and Marton Robinson.

Bios:

Dr. Valeria Grinberg Pla is a literary, cultural and film critic from Buenos Aires, Argentina, who like many other Latinxs has moved to the United States.  Since 2006 she is a Professor of Spanish at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.  She teaches classes that reflect her research interests on literary and film strategies to think about war trauma in Central America and on the Pan-African, transnational literary movements of the Afro-Caribbean populations of Central America.  Her most recent publications include "El Tránsito como estrategia de vida y de literatura: el proyecto literario transnacional en resistencia de los intelectuales afrocaribeños Eric Walrond, Claude McKay y Samuel Nation" (Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 2020), "Against Anomie: Julio Hernández Cordón's Post-War Trilogy" (Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, 2018) and "Filming Responsibly: Ethnicity, Community, and the Nation in Ana Lucía Cuevas's El eco del dolor de mucha gente" (Latin American Documentary in the New Millennium, 2016).  She is on the editorial board of Istmo. Revista virtual de estudios literarios y culturales centroamericanos (http://istmo.denison.edu/) and she coordinated, with Ricardo Roque Baldovinos, the second volume of the series 'Towards a History of the Central American Literatures,' Tensiones de la modernidad: del modernismo al realismo (2009).

Costa Rican artist Marton Robinson has an interdisciplinary background informed by his studies in both Physical Education and Art and Visual Communication.  He completed an MFA at the University of Southern California.  Robinson's art, which is informed mainly by African-American traditions, challenges the conventional representations of black identities in art history, mainstream culture, and the official national narratives, especially those of Cost Rica.  With an often ironic and rhetorical take on the constructs of racism, this practice endeavors to confront the hierarchies and conceptions inherited from colonialism in order to subvert the mindsets and prejudices ingrained in our social experience.  Robinson's work exposes teh nuances present in the Afro-Latino experience, enriching the critical discourse of contemporary works of the African Diaspora.  Robinson has participated in exhibitions in spaces such as:  The Getty Center, California; Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo, Costa Rica; Vincent Price Art Museum, California; Fundación Ars TEOR/éTica, Costa Rica; Museo de Arte Costarricense, Costa Rica; New Wight Gallery, California; X Bienal Centroamericana, Costa Rica; Pacific Standard Time LA/LA; Aidekman Arts Center, Boston; Le Palais de Tokyo, France; Bergen Kjøtt, Bergen Norway; Centro de la Imagen, México; ARTBO Colombia; Prizm Art Fair; Mandeville Gallery, New York; Gallery GVCC, Casablanca; Museo Amparo, México; 21st Biennial Contemporary Art Sesc Videobrasil, Brazil.

This event is sponsored by the department of Central American and Transborder Studies at CSUN.

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