NFC | Sometimes a Hippopotamus Is Just a Hippopotamus
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Get your free tickets now to "Sometimes a Hippopotamus Is Just a Hippopotamus: Animal Tropings in Colombian Culture Post-2009", a Northrop Frye Centre and The Centre for Comparative Literature lecture featuring Rory O’Bryen, Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture, University of Cambridge.
Where: Room VC 102
About: This seminar will trace the fortunes of a bloat of African hippopotamuses introduced to Colombia in the early 1970s by notorious drug baron, Pablo Escobar, and which, since the 2000s, have been roaming around the middle reaches of the nation’s major river, the Río Magdalena. Having mapped these amphibious creatures’ wanderings beyond Escobar’s country-estate-cum-safari-theme-park, the talk will chart their migrations, as signifying animals, through four cultural objects: a prize-winning ‘post-Escobar’ novel, El ruido de las cosas al caer (Juan Gabriel Vásquez, 2011), an animated docudrama, "Pablo’s Hippos" (Antonio Von Hildebrand, 2010), a selection of political cartoons and news articles, and paintings from the collection ‘Estudios de paisajes comparados’ (2008-2023) by the self-styled ‘artificial naturalist’, Alberto Baraya. The seminar draws on insights from memory studies, animal studies, political theory and landscape aesthetics to explore what oblique and unsettling insights these encounters with the animal might offer into the ecology, the social and political life and the culture of a South American river in the twenty-first century.
About this Speaker: Rory O’Bryen is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge. He teaches and researches on modern Latin American culture, and has particular research interests in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Colombian culture and history. He is the author of Literature, Testimony and Cinema in Contemporary Colombian Culture: Spectres of "La Violencia" (Woodridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2008), which explores the role of violence in the production of urban space and the urbanizing dimensions of memory discourses on violence in Colombia. His current research explores the representation of the Magdalena River in Colombian culture between 1850 and the present day. It engages with a range of works, including mid-nineteenth-century regional romances, late nineteenth-century Afro-Colombian poetry, representations of leprosy in early twentieth-century literature, music and silent film, the ‘novela de la Violencia’ of the 1950s, and late twentieth-century engagements with narcotráfico. In doing so it uses the river as a conduit into the fragile interplay between nation-formation and global political and economic processes.
Lecture presented in collaboration with the Centre for Comparative Literature.