Please join the English department for a talk by Edgar Garcia entitled "Caravaggio's Americas."

This presentation relocates the emergence of the baroque from Europe to the Americas, arguing that the anxieties of eroded sovereignty amidst legal heterogeneity that gave rise to the baroque did not begin in Counter-Reformational responses to Protestantism but earlier in encounters with legal and cultural others of the indigenous Americas. In this account, Counter Reformation precedes the Reformation and is, in its expression as the baroque, inescapably indigenous to the Americas. In turn, this view of the baroque from the Americas helps to recast, revisualize, and interpret the works of late sixteenth-century Roman painter and living catastrophe on legs Caravaggio.

Edgar Garcia is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Chicago. He is a poet and scholar working on the hemispheric literatures and cultures of the Americas. He is the author of Emergency: Reading the Popul Vuh in a Time of Crisis, Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu, and Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography.