ABOUT THE BOOK:
Much has been written about landfills and the monumentality of
rubbish, but little attention has been paid to "litter," the small trash
that soils the urban pavement, like the bits of chewing gum that some
artists decorate. Talking Trash looks at refuse in its early
stages, when it is still tiny and unassuming, still lives in the city,
and has yet to grow, leave the metropolis, and accumulate in landfills.
The chapters of Talking Trash reflect upon the anthropomorphic
nature of urban refuse; upon the poetics and semantics of
micro-litterscapes and the archives of all things discarded; upon
"Dumpsterology," or the history of the garbage container as a gendered
artifact dense with cultural meaning; and upon "dirty innocence," or the
complex and contradictory link that ties childhood to muck.
The author also focuses on one significant non-urban scene, the desert
landscape and the clothing and other items that immigrants discard as
they make a desperate trek across the border.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Maite Zubiaurre
is Associate Dean for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, Humanities
Division, and Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and
the Department of Germanic Languages at UCLA. Her areas of expertise are
Twentieth-century Peninsular literature; European (particularly German)
and Latin American Realism; comparative literature; gender studies;
urban studies; cultural studies; Latin American women's fiction; and
Latina and Chicana fiction.
DISCUSSANTS:
Charlene Villaseñor Black,
whose research focuses on the art of the Ibero-American world, is
Professor of Art History and Chicana/o Studies at UCLA. While much of
her research investigates the politics of religious art and global
exchange, she is also actively engaged in the Chicana/o art scene.
Allison Carruth
is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Institute of
the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. Her current research
interests include environmental narrative and science communication; the
role of artists and writers in American environmental and food justice
movements; and the evolving relationships between ecology,
sustainability and engineering in the US since the 1980s.
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Duration: 01:15:25
Trash-Talk-lp-0li.mp3