Agrarian Studies Colloquium: Santiago Acosta "Unearthing Value: Visions of Gold in Contemporary Venezuelan Art"

The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.

This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.

It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms are meaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?

Meetings are Fridays, 11am -1pm Eastern Time.

Meetings will be held in a hybrid format, both on Zoom and in-person at 230 Prospect Street, Room 101.

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Santiago Acosta is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. He specializes in modern and contemporary Latin American literature and visual arts, which he examines through the lenses of cultural studies, political economy, and environmental theory. His book manuscript, We Are Like Oil: An Ecology of the Venezuelan Culture Boom, explores how literature and the visual arts interacted with the environmental shifts of the 1970s oil boom in Venezuela. He is also the co-editor of the volume Ecopoéticas y políticas ecológicas desde el Sur, currently under contract at Brill Academic Publishers. In 2021-23, he was the PRODiG Fellow at the State University of New York in Old Westbury, where he helped launch the institution’s new Environmental Studies degree.