About
About
In her debut novel Carnaval Fever, Yuliana Ortiz Ruano proposes music and festivities as revelatory performance structures that offer insights into crises. Join us as we celebrate the translation of the novel into English with an immersive listening session and conversation between author Yuliana Ortiz Ruano and Professors Nohora Arrieta Fernández (UCLA) and Luis Rincón Alba (NYU).
The conversation and listening session will follow the musicality of the text to explore how rhythm and dance reveal the structural forces affecting communities of color in Ecuador today.
Participants
Participants
Yuliana Ortiz Ruano
Yuliana Ortiz Ruano is an Afro-Ecuadorian writer, poet, and teacher, as well as a DJ of Afro-Caribbean music. She has published several books of poetry and prose, including the multi award-winning Fiebre de carnaval (Carnaval Fever), which, among other accolades, was chosen as one of the 50 best books of 2022 by El País. She is also the author of the poetry books Sovoz, Canciones del fin del mundo, y Cuaderno del imposible retorno a Pangea, and the book of short stories Litorales. She was selected by the International Writers in Residence program in Granada, Spain in 2023, and was chosen for the Translator Choice II award at the LATINALE Latin America Literature Festival in Berlin. As a curator, she organized the national exhibit Afrofuturisms: Ancestral Technopoetics for the Future and is currently leading a UNESCO-funded project titled "Re-escribir la isla, Re-habitar el tránsito, Autohistorias de mujeres afrodescendientes de la Isla Trinitaria" [Re-writing the island, Re-inhabiting transit: Auto-histories of Afro-descendent women of the Trinitaria Island].
Nohora Arrieta Fernández
Nohora Arrieta Fernández received her Ph.D. in Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies from Georgetown University in 2021, and was a UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow (2021-2023). Her current research focuses on art history, visual studies, the history of commodities, and the intellectual traditions of the African Diaspora in the Americas. She has published essays and articles on Latin American literature and visual arts, comics, and the Afro-Latin American Diaspora, and is a collaborator of art magazines such as Artishock and Contemporyand. Her first co-translation project, Semantic of the World, the Poetry of Romulo Bustos, was published by New Mexico Press (2022). Nohora’s research has been supported by Fulbright, the Brazilian Studies Association, The American Council for Learned Societies, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Luis Rincón Alba
Luis Rincón Alba, Ph.D., is an artist and performance studies scholar whose work interrogates the political and social resonance of Caribbean and Latin American festive practices. Bridging Black studies, sound studies, and political theory in conversation, his research explores the poetic intersection of carnivals, riots, and radical solidarities—the subject of his forthcoming book. His writing has appeared in TDR, the Journal of Festive Studies, emisférica, the MoMA exhibition publication for DonChristian Jones, ArteInformado and El País. Currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art & Public Policy at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Rincón Alba’s creative practice employs performance, film, sound, and text to map the unspoken lineages of rebellion. His recent work has been featured at Hannah Traore Gallery (NYC) and Sovereign Futures (Tulsa), including the performance Chant Down and the installation The Voice does Go Up.
