MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | MOBILITIES

Olga Sendra Ferrer
Department of Romance Languages & Literatures Wesleyan University

This lecture will consider a triple-sided relationship between urban environment, photography, and literature, in order to show how photography and the written text not only reproduce but also reciprocally construct the physicality of the city. Through the urban theories of Henry Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and Edward Soja, we will develop a new theory, the concept of margin, that breaks with the urban geography of dictatorship-era Barcelona, which was characterized, in broad strokes, by a dual process of interrupted planning and abusive speculation, and created a peripheral city inhabited by the “other Catalans.” This simplistic center-periphery axis neglects not only the complexity of the margin, but also the heterogeneity of this Barcelona that will establish the foundations of the city into the 21st century. In this presentation, I will show how literature and photography envisions a new urban topography in which they make the margin manifest by questioning and contesting the fixedness of bourgeois Barcelona, while simultaneously seeking their own legitimization as citizens with the right to intervene in the construction and management of this city.

MONDAY, MARCH 2, 2015  |  6 P.M.
DANIEL FAMILY COMMONS  |  USDAN UNIVERSITY CENTER