A public lecture of Professor Azfar Hussain

Words against Bullets and Bombs: Poetry as Weapon in Contemporary Latin America


A public lecture by Professor Azfar Hussain, Liberal Studies/ Brooks College of Interdisciplinary Studies, Grand Valley State University. Azfar Hussain is Visiting Professor of Liberal Studies/Interdisciplinary Studies at GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIVERSITY, ALLENDALE, MICHIGAN, USA. His email address is azfar@wsu.edu andhussaina@gvsu.edu

Professor Azfar Hussain with his wife Melissa

Date and Time: April 09, 2012 (Monday), 7:00 pm--8:30 pm

Venue: Room: B-2-118 Mackinac, Grand Valley State University, Allendale, Michigan

Jointly Organized and Sponsored by the Department of Modern Languages & the Program in Latin American Studies, Grand Valley State University 

Some words

Rereading the Peruvian Marxist theorist-activist José Carlos Mariátegui’s “Art, Revolution, and Decadence,” the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s “Toward an Impure Poetry,” and the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton’s “Poetry and Militancy in Latin America”—while deriving aesthetic principles and theoretical frameworks from them—Azfar Hussain's lecture maps out certain terrains in contemporary Latin American poetry as the explosive sites of radical and even revolutionary praxis, ones that attest to the power—and even the “magic and miracle”—of the word, as it is worlded. Dwelling on the worldliness of the word, Hussain also explores certain politically significant connections between a whole host of Latin American poets and their counterparts in Africa and Asia, particularly in the Arab world, and thus Hussain underlines the global dimensions and directions of Latin American poetry today.