Date: March 25, 2019
Location: CAD2/UFMG

Literary production related to immigrants will be the focus of the presentations led by the invited speakers. Professor Cristina Cheveresan will bring the experience of two renowned American writers of Latin American origin, Julia Alvarez (Dominican) and Cristina Garcia (Cuban), highlighting how these authors perceive and fictionalize the processes of transnational identity formation and cultural negotiation, triggered by the diasporic experiences and displacements caused by the notorious regimes of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and Castro in Cuba.

Professor Elcio Cornelsen’s presentation will focus on the novel The Idiot of the 21st Century: A Divan (original title: Der Idiot des 21. Jahrhunderts: Ein Divan), by German writer Michael Kleeberg, published in 2018. The chapter “Gottfried and Amir” will be particularly focused, in which the titular characters—a 19th-century German immigrant and a 21st-century Syrian refugee—converse in an unusual scene about their traumatic experiences of immigration, flight, and exile.

Speakers: Professor Cristina Cheveresan of the West University of Timisoara, Romania, and Professor Elcio Loureiro Cornelsen of the Faculty of Letters of the Federal University of Minas Gerais.