Brad Epps (University of Cambridge)

Tuesday 2 December 6.00pm, Room 417, Malet Street (entrance via Torrington Sq.), Birkbeck, University of London, Main Building, London WC1E 7HX

Invasión, one of the most celebrated and least seen and studied ‘cult’ films in the history of Argentine cinema, is rife with secrets, enigmas, and riddles, ellipses and tropes of estrangement. Its screenplay was written by Hugo Santiago, its director, in collaboration with Jorge Luis Borges, that master of conundrum and paradox, from a story penned by Borges in collaboration with his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares. This paper examines some of the political and aesthetic implications of a film in which sound and sight are anything but unobstructed, communication and perception anything but straightforward, meaning anything but clear, and identity anything but sure and stable.

Brad Epps is Professor of Spanish and Head of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Cambridge. He was Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Professor and former Chair of the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University for over two decades. He has published extensively on modern literature, film, art, architecture, urban theory, queer theory, and immigration from Spain, Latin America, Hispanophone Africa, and Catalonia, and is the author of Significant Violence: Oppression and Resistance in the Narratives of Juan Goytisolo; Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity (with Luis Fernández Cifuentes); Passing Lines: Immigration and Sexuality (with Bill Johnson-González and Keja Valens); All About Almodóvar: A Passion for Cinema (with Despina Kakoudaki); a special issue of Catalan Review on Barcelona and modernity, and a special issue of GLQ (with Jonathan Katz) on lesbian theorist Monique Wittig.