About the event
What are the politics and processes of archival and cultural recovery? How does recovery change historical narratives? How does the reconstruction of material histories affect present-day societies? Recently discovered documentation from the Spanish Civil War is altering our understanding of the conflict today. Among the recoveries: "The Mexican Suitcase," lost negatives by photographers Robert Capa, Chim (David Seymour), and Gerda Taro, that led to the eponymous exhibition at the International Center for Photography (ICP); and Savage Coast (2013), a lost novel by the American poet Muriel Rukeyser. Join Jo Labanyi (NYU), founding editor of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, who will moderate a conversation between Cynthia Young, curator of the ICP exhibition “The Mexican Suitcase,” Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, editor of Rukeyser’s novel Savage Coast, and Dacia Viejo Rose (Cambridge), author of Reconstructing Spain: Cultural Heritage and Memory after the Civil War (2011), to discuss how the period’s political, cultural, and aesthetic concerns remain urgent today, and to consider the enduring legacy of the Spanish Civil War on issues of gender, violence, and transnational solidarities.
