María Rosa Lojo participó en el LV Congreso de la Asociación Canadiense de Hispanistas, como Featured Speaker (oradora destacada), celebrado en la University of British Columbia (Vancouver), del 5 al 7 de junio de 2019. En tal calidad, ofreció dos conferencias plenarias. El 5 de junio: “El retorno de nuestras voces originarias: los indios ranqueles, del siglo XIX al XXI”; el 6 de junio: “Mujeres de letras argentinas como traductoras culturales: de Eduarda Mansilla a Victoria Ocampo”.
Los resúmenes temáticos de ambas exposiciones fueron publicados en el Programa del Congreso (http://www.hispanistas.ca/congresos/2019/programa2019.pdf):
Dr. Lojo’s first address will examine how recent Argentine
historical fictions are attempting to recover the mutilated collective memory
of Indigenous communities (who participated actively in the wars of
independence) as co-founders of the nation – an idea erased from the Argentine
imaginary by Julio Argentino Roca’s successful offensive wars against the
Indigenous communities of central and southern Argentina (1878-1885). In both
addresses, Dr. Lojo’s will draw on her academic research as well as her
insights as an award-winning novelist.
Dr. Lojo’s second address will examine the dialogue that Mansilla and Ocampo,
who are part of an Argentine tradition of travelling, cosmopolitan,
multilingual women writers, establish with different western cultures. Through
analysis of their experiences of admiration and incomprehension of other
cultures, Dr. Lojo will trace the development of specific individual and
collective identities that are not reducible to European parameters. In both
addresses, Dr. Lojo’s will draw on her academic research as well as her
insights as an award-winning novelist.
Las
presentaciones fueron apoyadas por la Embajada de España en Canadá / Embassy of
Spain in Canada y la Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences /
Fédération des sciences humaines.
Durante el mismo congreso el profesor Norman Cheadle expuso el trabajo “The Concept of ‘Travel’ in the Work of María Rosa Lojo.”
In the Afterword to the Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Travel Writing (2018), Mary Louise Pratt poses a series of questions: “What is ‘travel’ in the postcolonial frame? How can we supersede (decolonize) that equation of mobility and freedom that is built into the Western imagination, and into the concept of travel?” (225). Unlike Che Guevara, who always felt guilty about his wanderlust, the Argentine writer María Rosa Lojo, suffers no such complex. In a recent plenary conference (Universidad de Vigo, Sept. 11th, 2018), she stated that “almost all the books I’ve written are traversed by people who travel.” Some are latter-day variants of the passively “seeing man” with his Imperial Eyes, the male European adventurer-traveller critiqued by Pratt in her famous foundational text – for example, José Ortega y Gasset or Hermann von Keyserling, as they are novelized in Lojo’s Las libres del Sur (2004). But the most interesting travellers in Lojo’s historical novels are women, who in travelling at once undergo transformation and become active agents of world-creating transformation. Taken together they adumbrate a concept of travel quite different from that of Pratt’s “seeing man.” Through a survey of the dynamics of travel in selected texts by María Rosa Lojo – both her novels and her own travel text au deuxième degré titled “Una nueva excursión a los indios ranqueles” (1996), written for a journal of scientific popularization – this presentation will outline Lojo’s conceptualization of trave
El Dr. Cheadle traduce en la actualidad la novela de Lojo Las libres del Sur, que publicará la editorial canadiense McGill-Queen’s University Press (https://www.mqup.ca/)