Renowned Mexican writer and former professor-at-large Carlos Fuentes was remembered by former students and colleagues for uniting literary and political concerns in the public sphere at a bilingual colloquium earlier this week. Fuentes, an internationally celebrated novelist, died in May after an internal hemorrhage.
"Carlos Fuentes Beyond Borders," a series of talks and panels featuring former president of Chile Ricardo Lagos and Fuentes' former students, was an opportunity to "reflect on Carlos Fuentes' relationship to Brown and his legacy here," said Julio Ortega, professor of Hispanic studies, who organized the colloquium.
The Department of Hispanic Studies, the Transatlantic Project at Brown and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies hosted the two-day event at Rochambeau House and the Watson Institute for International Studies Monday and Tuesday. Past colloquia hosted by the Department of Hispanic Studies covered various themes in Hispanic literature and history, but this colloquium was unique in its commemorative focus, Ortega said.
Six former students who worked with Fuentes as PhD candidates while at Brown were invited to speak at the colloquium Monday afternoon. They hailed from various parts of the Spanish-speaking world, including Mexico, Spain, Peru and Venezuela, but all are now professors at American universities. Each drew on their personal relationship with Fuentes to illuminate their discussion of the renowned professor's work, Ortega said. Topics included Fuentes' "fantastic imagination," his role as a social critic and his involvement as an intellectual who fostered U.S.-Latin American relations during the "boom" of politically engaged Latin American writers in the 1960s and 1970s.
Tuesday featured further panel discussions and papers given by academics from New York University, Princeton, Dartmouth and the University of Guadalajara, among others.
The colloquium closed with a talk given in Spanish by Lagos on Fuentes' position as a public intellectual. Fuentes was a recipient not only of several prestigious literary awards but also of the Belisario Dominguez Medal of Honor, the highest honor conferred by the Mexican government. Fuentes was "an extremely impressive intellectual ... a giant of literature," Lagos told The Herald.
Lagos was friends with Fuentes for over 20 years, he said. Both men straddled the divide between literature and politics. In 1998, Lagos, then a presidential candidate, was invited to the Julio Cortazar Latin American Chair at the University of Guadalajara, a lectureship established by Fuentes and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Two years later, Lagos was elected and has been a Brown professor-at-large since 2002.
Fuentes and Lagos had discussed speaking jointly in a session at this year's colloquium about the book they co-authored last year, "El siglo que despierta." Roughly translated as "The century that awakes," the book is a "political testament" examining the relationship of the intellectual to political life, Ortega said.
An air of remembrance was as much a part of the colloquium proceedings as academic discourse. "The most important thing to remember is that this is a memorial," said attendee Zach Bleckner '12.5.
"This is a bittersweet, sad session," said Professor of Political Science and CLACS director Richard Snyder. A highlight of Lagos' talk for Snyder was his quip that to choose an academic career "means you won't have an obituary." The colloquium was a celebratory testament to the contrary.
