Graduate Colloquium Series: Denise Meda Calderon (PHIL) 2/22/2022
"Altar Spaces among the Living and Dead: Chicanx Practices of Spiritual and Community Transformations"
Meeting ID: 939 7538 3030
Password: Calderon
“Altar Spaces among the Living and Dead: Chicanx Practices of Spiritual and Community Transformations”
Tuesday, February 22, 2022 | 4-5pm
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Zoom Meeting information:
Meeting ID: 939 7538 3030
Password: Calderon
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Denise Meda Calderon
Ph.D. candidate | Department of Philosophy
Abstract:
This paper explores how Chicanx artists imagine a multivocal sense of spirituality to critique colonial heteronormative and racializing ideologies and practices. In particular, Meda Calderon shows that Chicanx artists re-create a complex sense of spirituality that is significant to maintain an interdependent relationship with the dead. Through long standing aesthetic praxis of altar-making, she contends that invocations of the dead engage an aesthetic of resistance orientated towards sustaining relations with those who are otherwise marginalized and forgotten. Meda Calderon turns to altar activities by Amalia Mesa-Bains and Gloria Anzaldúa to illustrate how altars operate as part of a generative community-making practice.
The Graduate Colloquium offers graduate students an opportunity to discuss a work-in-progress with faculty and graduate students from different disciplines. By long-standing practice, colloquium presenters provide a draft of their current research, which is made available to members of the Glasscock Center listserv. Each colloquium begins with the presenter’s short (10-15 minute) exposition of the project, after which the floor is open for comments and queries. The format is by design informal, conversational, and interdisciplinary.
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