Events Calendar

UPCOMING POROI SEMINAR (!)
Dr. Eric Vázquez, "States of Defeat: U.S. Imaginaries of Revolutionary Central America"
 
Dr. Vázquez will be circulating the introduction to his book, States of Defeat, for us to workshop with him! He writes, “After over a century of international political uprisings, U.S. intellectuals looked on the twenty-first century and discerned that revolutionary struggle, previously an instrument for seizing an emancipated future, had somehow run aground. My book, States of Defeat: U.S. Imaginaries of Revolutionary Central America, reframes the closure of revolutionary horizons through the analysis of intellectual works about the Cold War's final paroxysm: wars of revolution and counterrevolution in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The novels, military training manuals, anthropological monographs, solidarity memoirs, and testimonies that make up the archive of States of Defeat evoke ambivalence, disappointment, mourning, outrage, cynicism, and misanthropy—sentiments I describe collectively with the term defeatedness. In the introduction of my book, I argue that these states of defeat anticipate critiques of emerging modes of imperial governance in the Global War on Terror.”
 
Eric Vázquez is an assistant professor in American and Latino studies at University of Iowa. He has published scholarship in Public Culture, Modern Fiction Studies, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Theory and Event.
 
What is a POROI Seminar? 
Each semester, POROI hosts rhetoric seminars featuring the work of UI and visiting scholars, artists, researchers and activists. Each seminar takes place with an audience from diverse disciplines who have read the work before meeting, and are prepared to engage with the text. The virtue of the format becomes apparent as disciplines and intellectual traditions cross paths with personal proclivities, reading habits, patterns of knowledge and modes of expressions. The group provides rigorous and supportive feedback, providing the speaker with ideas for revision and publication. Most presenters publish revised versions of their projects in scholarly publications, film festivals, research outlets, and other venues.

If you are interested in sharing your own project at a POROI rhetoric seminar, email kembrew-mcleod@uiowa.edu and naomi-greyser@uiowa.edu and we are glad to talk with you!