Thursday December 4, 2025 | 1:45PM-3:30PM

LBC 210 McKeever

Presenters

• Susanne Hackett (Tulane University, chair and moderator) “Romancing the Machete: the Yoruba Ogun Archetype in the Cuban Imaginary”

The machete is a recurring revolutionary symbol in Cuba, though frequently hidden in plain sight—the official logo of the Comités en Defensa de la Revolución (CDR) depicts a figure holding a blade aloft. Nationalist imagery and lore around the machete proliferated in Cuban popular culture early in the revolution, often associated with the iconic cimarrón (runaway slave) and mambí (Cuban independence fighter), for whom the machete represents both a weapon of resistance and a tool for labor. The children’s cartoon El negrito cimarrón portrayed its eponymous protagonist with a machete in hand. The film La primera carga al machete and the cartoon Elpidio Valdés propagated the belief that mambises possessed an innate capacity to fell Spanish soldiers with machetes as if they were mere stalks of cane.
Yoruba cosmology offers an additional, complementary valence of meaning: the machete is the singular, salient identifying symbol of the oricha Ogun, deity of War and Work and owner of the blacksmith’s forge, a symbol of technological and social advancement. These interrelated themes of resistance and labor are integral to Cuban ideologies of revolution, citizenship, masculinity, and nation-building since 1959.
The resonance between the cimarrón, the mambí and Ogun is underscored by their shared symbolic connection to the literal and metaphorical space of el monte, a preferred place of refuge for all three. These resonances take on deeper meaning in consideration of Wole Soyinka’s conception of Ogun as the “conqueror of transition” who epitomizes the metaphysical “Fourth Stage” of transformative and restorative justice.

• Alicia Echavarria (Northwestern University), “Remembering Palos: Weaving Collective Memory through Fabulation”

In the beginning of October of 1937, dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo ordered the extermination of Haitian people in the Dominican Republic. This genocide of Haitian and Afro-Dominican people is now known as El Corte (the cutting) or the Parsley Massacre. El Corte cemented the ideology of anti-Haitianism as a part of Dominican nationalism and sovereignty. Though Trujillo and his successors have maintained this ultranationalist stance in re-writing the history of violence as one of liberation and resistance, Dominican artistry has read against the archive, incorporating the African and Haitian cultural and religious traditions that still remain amongst the community to (re)present violence and understandings of national identity. Palo refers to a music genre of spiritual manifestation, relying on percussion (sacred palos) to perform rituals of healing within Dominican Afro-syncretic spaces. In an homage to palo, Francisco Disla Ferreira’s El Hoyo Del Diablo (2012) uses critical fabulation to portray the erasure and marginalization of Blackness and Haiti as a violent haunting on Dominican national identity. Remembering palos through the horror genre, means using haunting to unsettle dominant historical narratives that center whiteness and using collective memories of trauma to reconstruct understandings of race and identity in the Dominican Republic.

• Nahuel Ribke (The Open University of Israel), “Black Orpheus’s Multicolor Brazil, Cinemascope Technology and the Economics of On-Location Shooting”

Black Orpheus (1959), a French film shot in Brazil that reinterprets the Orpheus myth within the Afro-Brazilian communities of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, achieved global box-office success and critical acclaim, and was widely praised for the striking beauty of its visuals and original soundtracks. While the film had a profound impact, shaping Brazil’s international image and expanding the global reach of its music, it also faced strong criticism from Brazilian cultural elites for its “orientalist” portrayal of Afro-Brazilian culture and people.
This presentation analyzes the production and reception of Black Orpheus through four key perspectives. First, it considers questions of authorship, focusing on the figure of Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes and how the historical contexts of post-World War II Brazil and France led to the transformation of his idea into a transnational feature film. Second, it examines the technological, economic, and political arrangements, calculations, and negotiations involved in filming on location in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1950s. Third, it revisits the debate about the ownership of Black Orpheus’s music authorial rights and the film’s place in the broader debate on neocolonialism.
The final section of the presentation explores the filmmaker`s racial-visual approach to casting and performance in Black Orpheus and looks into the film’s lasting impact on its Afro-Brazilian non-professional actors and on the broader Afro-Brazilian community. In analyzing Marcel Camus’s declining filmmaking career after this film, this section also considers the rapidly shifting global political climate that rendered Black Orpheus’s once-successful formula obsolete within a short period.

• Mary Leonard (University of Cincinnati), “Movements in Puerto Rican Film and Media: Wandering, Breaking Out, Returning”

Film and media are ontological. Mimetically or metaphorically, they represent aspects of lived experience. When media produced in a particular context are examined together they can provide insight into the zeitgeist in a particular time and place. This talk is about three movements associated with film and media in Puerto Rico that, like currents at play on the surface of the sea, signal the presence of forces below it. The first consists of a group of films made just before, during, and after the 2014 economic crisis, that are characterized by a wandering structure. Melancholic or agitated characters go nowhere, search, or seek to escape. Some end nihilistically with violence or death or a forced return to stasis. Others embody what Glissant calls errantry – wandering that seeks relation – and end inconclusively. The second movement is breaking out. It consists of media largely created between 2014 and now, a period of disasters, social and political upheaval, and economic decline that has been met with a culture of resistance. Media associated with it are highly performative, combative, and fashionable. They are associated with street culture and urban music, and push boundaries. The third movement is one of returning as seen in a turn towards history in contemporary popular media, and in recent scholarship around the history of film in Puerto Rico that is complicating and enriching existing narratives, and making it possible to reconnect with the past in new ways. This talk will be accompanied by visual illustrations of these movements.