Arnaldo Cruz Malave, "Between Irony and Adoration: New York Hispanic Caribbean Cultural Expression and the Queer Underground"

This talk offers an examination of the relationship of New York’s Queer Underground to New York’s Hispanic Caribbean Culture, focusing on issues such as the value of irony and belief in the works of Queer Hispanic Caribbean Underground artists. Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé (B.A., Yale University; Ph.D., Stanford) is Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Fordham University in New York. His research focuses on contemporary Hispanic Caribbean transitions, queer diasporas, New York in Latino literature and film, urban Latino culture, sexuality studies, and the writings of José Lezama Lima. He is author of Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails (Palgrave 2007), a book on the relationship between high art and Latino popular culture in the gentrifying New York of the 1980s, and of El primitivo implorante (Rodopi 1994), a study of the intersections of nationalism and sexuality in the prose fiction of the Cuban neobaroque author, José Lezama Lima. He is coeditor of Queer Globalization: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (New York UP 2002).