This proposed panel is concerned with satirical responses to corruption, injustice, disenfranchisement and economic crisis from across Hispanic cultural production. Papers may analyze dark comedy in film, comics and cartoons, narrative, theater, visual arts, social media, and so on from Spain, Latin America, and Latinx America and from any time period. The aim of this proposed panel is to explore the tragicomic sensibility in Hispanic cultural production with a focus on social critique and, where possible, to trace genealogies and compare/contrast satirical representations across the Spanish-speaking world. We ask: How do our proposed texts relate to the terms: dark comedy, grotesque, esperpento, farce, tragicomedy, humorism, wit?

24th AISNA Biennial Conference

The US and the World We Inhabit
University of Milan, September 28-30, 2017

Paper proposals (max. 300 words) should be submitted, together with a brief biographical note, to the Workshop Coordinators and carbon copied to the Conference Organizer, Paola Loreto (paola.loreto@unimi.it), by June 15, 2017. Successful proponents will be notified by June 30, 2017. Workshops exceeding four participants will be split into two sessions.

1. The Wor(l)ds We Inhabit: Modes and Moods of Reading

This panel seeks papers that address the disruptive role of clothes along with the possibility they provide the individual or a group to challenge a super-imposed set of rules and to create discontinuity within their community. 

The purpose of this panel is to shed light on the many functions of clothes in literature and cinema but not only, and on how clothing and garments can become symbols of individual power and redemption. Throughout what they choose to wear or not to wear, men and women send a clear message against the passive acceptance of injustices and prevarications. Moreover, clothes may represent the ability for the subject to denounce the establishment and to assert their freedom and individuality. 

This panel examines the imbrication of the avant-garde with mass-produced art in order to discern the relationships between the proliferation of images and capitalism in the advent of modern visual culture. Imitating the shock value of advertising, the avant-gardists appeal to the eye of the viewer to gain visibility in the domains of art and draw the consumer’s attention to its product, thereby revealing the profit-oriented motives of marketplace exchanges. Immaterialities such as images are thus transformed into commodities that blend high and low aesthetic genres that participate in the consumer society.