Friday Speaker Series: Evelyn Saavedra Autry

“Singing Feminist Ch’ixi+Art Music: Andean Rhythms, Hip-hop, and Indigenous Youth in Contemporary Latin America”

Dr. Evelyn Saavedra Autry is a 2020-2021 American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellow and a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in Race, Racism, and Inequality at the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) at Rutgers University. She received her PhD in Romance Languages with a specialization in Latin American Studies and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Georgia. Her research creates a conversation between various fields of knowledge, particularly Indigenous epistemologies, and pedagogies, literature, cultural studies on (de)coloniality, and gender studies, through the analysis of Andean women’s identity formations.

In her current book project, Race, Gender, and Memory in Narratives of the Andes, Dr. Saavedra Autry constructs a genealogy of gender-based violence that offers an in-depth examination of the colonial mechanisms behind the objectification of Indigenous women. This book asks, in what ways do cultural productions configure racialized women? How do traditional and contemporary narratives of gendered violence represent indigenized female bodies? How is knowledge production about Indigenous women’s experiences shaping memory politics and human rights discourses? Responding to these questions, the book is propelled by the necessity to examine a diverse corpus that includes chronicles of the Spanish conquest, foundational indigenista works, popular Indigenous art, and literature of Peru’s armed conflict. By reading these materials together and drawing from the fields of literature, history, and studies on coloniality, gender, and memory, the book traces how Indigenous female bodies have been understood, constructed, and commodified as sites of conquest, free labor, sexual availability, and justified violence. 

*This talk is sponsored by the Department of Romance Languages