The Poetics of Gastronomic History: Salvador Novo’s Cocina Mexicana @A300 November 12th- 7pm

Please mark in your calendar the upcoming conference below:

Department of Hispanic Studies (Glendon)
invites you to its first of the 2019-2020 series of talks on Hispanic culture

The Poetics of Gastronomic History: Salvador Novo’s Cocina Mexicana
(delivered in English)

Guest speaker:
Prof. Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
Washington University in St Louis

November 12, 2019, 7 PM
BMO Skyroom, YH-A300
Glendon Campus, York University
2275 Bayview Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M4N 3M6

Summary of the presentation:
Salvador Novo’s Cocina Mexicana has for many years been considered a key source in the history of Mexico City cuisine and, as scholars like José Luis Juárez López argue, the central text in the “apologetic” school of Mexican gastronomical writing, which planted the seeds for culinary nationalism and other paradigms for the high valuation of Mexican cuisine. Rather than relying on its narration, as most of its readers do, this lecture will read the narrative and structure of Novo’s book to study gastronomic history as a poetics of modernity and nation, and as an intermittent literary genre with precedents such as Alfonso Reyes’s Memorias de bodega y de cocina and followers like Adolfo Castañón’s Grano de sal y otros cristales. The lecture will also argue that Novo’s book shapes culinary history as a literary form in a dialectical relationship with the chronicle genre and with the mass urbanization of Mexico City, in order to resist models of Americanization. To achieve this analytic goal, Prof. Sánchez Prado will argue in dialogue with theories of cultural history and social form, primarily in dialogue with the work of Caroline Levine.

Speaker’s bio:
Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado is Jarvis Thurston and Mona Van Duyn Professor in Humanities in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in Saint Louis, where he teaches for the Department of Romance Languages and Literature and the Latin American Studies Program. His research focuses on the relationship between aesthetics, ideology and cultural institutions in Mexico, with a particular focus on literature and cinema. He is the author of El canon y sus formas. La reinvención de Harold Bloom y sus lecturas hispanoamericanas (2002), Naciones intelectuales. Las fundaciones de la modernidad literaria mexicana (1917-1959) (2009), winner of the LASA Mexico 2010 Humanities Book Award: Intermitencias americanistas. Ensayos académicos y literarios (2004-2009) (2012), Screening Neoliiberalism. Transforming Mexican Cinema 1988-2012 (2014), Strategic Occidentalism. On Mexican Fiction, The Neoliberal Book Market and the Question of World Literature (2018), and Intermitencias alfonsinas. Estudios y otros textos (2004-2018) (2019). He has edited and co-edited eleven scholarly collections, the most recent of which are A History of Mexican Literature (with Anna Nogar and José Ramón Ruisánchez, 2016), Mexican Literature in Theory (2018) and Pierre Bourdieu in Hispanic Literature and Culture (2019). He has published over eighty scholarly articles on Mexican literature, culture and film, and on Latin American cultural theory.

Please RVSP by November 4, 2019 to spanish@glendon.yorku.ca