Silvio Torres-Saillant, Professor in the English Department, formerly headed the Latino-Latin American Studies Program in the College of Arts and Sciences. He co-founded La Casita Cultural Center, an organization opened in the Near West Side of the City of Syracuse with the mission to create bridges of communication, collaboration, and exchange linking Syracuse University with the Latino population of the city and promoting the Hispanic heritages of Central New York.  He completed a two-year term as William P. Tolley Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities. Professor Torres-Saillant's research and teaching interests revolve around central concerns pertaining to the enduring legacy of the colonial transaction spearheaded by the Christian West starting over five centuries ago. They have to do with the relations of power that make bodies of knowledge unequal across regions, languages, and cultures of the world. They involve the disparate value attached in the academy to ideas and ways of knowing depending on the geopolitical location of their producers. They respond to the continuing monopoly that the Christian West holds over the authority to define the human. As such, his research and teaching projects touch on race, ethnicity, intellectual history, imperial violence, the problem of culture and civilization, diaspora, migration, the tension between the ethnic and the human, and the necessity to interrupt the logic of maltreatment that informs the corporate capitalist system spawned by the colonial transaction. He is the author of several books including Caribbean Poetics and An Intellectual History of the Caribbean, and multiple articles. He is also one of the founders and editors of the Latino/a Studies Journal.

Questions, email garciapena@fas.harvard.edu 

Event co-sponsored by the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, The Observatorio, the Afro-Latin American Institute and DRCLAS

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