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Dr Carrie Hamilton, Reader in History at Roehampton University
will present the David Vilaseca Memorial Lecture on 29th October at
6.15pm, Founder’s Building, Main Lecture Theatre, Royal Holloway, University of London, followed by a drinks reception
POLITICS AND GENEROSITY: HISTORY AND THE WORK OF DAVID VILASECA
The academic work of David Vilaseca (1964-2010) as developed in his three monographs - The Apocryphal Subject (1995), Hindsight and the Real (2003) and Queer Events (2010) - offers a series of radical interventions in Hispanic
studies, queer theory and critical theory through close readings of twentieth-century autobiography, as well as fiction and films, in Spanish and Catalan. While primarily interested in questions of - and philosophical debates around - subjectivity, Vilaseca's
books are also framed by the question of what constitutes the political. And while cautioning against a preoccupation with 'cultural specificity' as a way of potentially silencing alterity, Vilaseca's brilliant textual analyses nonetheless take his reader
through some of the major historical developments of the twentieth century: the Spanish Civil War, Franco dictatorship, and transition to democracy; European colonialism; and the Cuban Revolution. This lecture will bring some of these examples into dialogue
with contemporary debates in history around some key 'Vilasecan' themes, such as subjectivity, fantasy, time, politics and ethics. The aim is not so much to 'theorise' history, or to 'contextualise' theory, but rather to explore aspects of Vilaseca's important
intellectual legacy within and beyond his own writing.
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