Edgar Garcia | Caravaggio's Americas

This talk relocates the where and when of the baroque to the sixteenth-century Americas, arguing that the anxieties of eroded sovereignty amidst legal heterogeneity that gave rise to the baroque began not in Counter-Reformation responses to Protestantism but earlier in encounters with the legal and cultural others of the indigenous Americas. In this account, the spirit of the Counter Reformation precedes the Reformation and is, in its expression as the baroque, inescapably entangled with Indigenous cultures and polities of the Americas. In turn, this view of the baroque from the Americas helps to recast, interpret, and even re-visualize the works of the iconic late sixteenth-century Roman painter and living catastrophe-on-legs Caravaggio. 

Related Events

The day after his lecture, on November 19, Garcia will join us at the Center for more events:

Workshop | Not Looking At, Looking With — 1:00 PM
This event is open to all Stanford graduate students and to others by invitation.

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Live Taping of Philosophy Talk | Crisis and Creativity in Mayan Mythology — 7:00 PM
The Popol Vuh, written in 1702, was based on a Mayan oral tradition encompassing creation myths, history, and cosmology. These stories were written in a time of crisis: European colonialism had decimated the Mayan population and destroyed much of their cultural knowledge. How do stories help a society survive and thrive? Can they console us in times of crisis? How much of a culture can historians save in times of devastation?

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About the Speaker

Edgar Garcia is a poet and scholar of the hemispheric cultures of the Americas. He is the author of Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence Books, 2019), Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis. He has also collaborated on such projects as the anthology American Literature in the World (Columbia University Press, 2017) and the artist book Infinite Regress (Bom Dia Books, 2021). Recently (2022–24) he was visiting editor-in-chief of the journal of innovative literary arts, Fence, where he edited special issues on such topics as “What’s the Problem with American Poetry Right Now?” and “The Gods.” At present, he is working on a few projects: a collection of adaptations and translations of the mid-sixteenth century, Nahuatl-language Cantares Mexicanos; a book about divination and migration titled “Migrant Lots”; and a collection of essays on the baroque and the Americas titled “Caravaggio’s Americas.” 

He is an associate professor in the departments of English and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago. 

About the Series

A gift to endowment from Marta Sutton Weeks in 1987 provides funds to bring visiting distinguished lecturers to Stanford University for stays varying in duration from one week up to one quarter. The visitors join the Stanford community to engage in meaningful discussion on a wide variety of humanities topics.
 

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