To Dream is to Know / Soñar es Saber 

I am currently a Public Humanities Practicum Fellow at the Alice Kaplan Center for the Humanities at Northwestern University. Through the practicum, I am developing a video podcast titled To Dream is to Know / Soñar es Saber. This podcast will take as its subject Latin American surrealist and magical realist literature, film, visual art, and other works of cultural production which engage dreams as a major theme and demonstrate ways of knowing that exceed Western epistemologies. Within the scope of the Public Humanities Practicum, I will produce the first three podcast episodes. These will be about Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo; María Sabina’s Vida; and the paintings and literature of Leonora Carrington. I will use these case studies as grounds for exploring the connections between the popularity of magical realism and surrealism within Latin American cultural production and Indigenous epistemologies which remain prominent within Latin American onto-epistemological schemas. I believe this project to be particularly important as the “American Dream” continues to be exposed as an anachronistic notion founded on false ideals, and Americans seek out models of enacting more hopeful realities through dreams. This project is ultimately aligned with but distinct from my dissertation, Minor Meditations: Techniques for Other Ways of Being, in which I work at the intersections of minoritarian performance theory, psychological anthropology, and Indigenous studies to consider Indigenous Latin American artists and healers who use contemplative practices to transform subjectivity and corporeality. 

Check back in the coming months for the finished project!