2018-2019 Romance Studies Dialogue Series

Arte, memoria y resistencia en la Galicia de posguerra: el caso de José Meijón.

Meet José Meijón Area, the eccentric, presumably uncultured

stonemason from Marín (Pontevedra) who lived through Spain’s
last colonial wars in Africa, survived the Civil War and went
through the ensuing dictatorship using the stones in the environing
parishes as a book of memory on which for decades he
compulsively sculpted petroglyphs and script with his hammer and
chisel. Meijón left a vast collection of delirious and cryptic
Germán Labrador Méndez inscriptions scattered throughout the coastal villages of southern
Princeton University Galicia alongside the region’s more famous petroglyphs from the
Introducer:
Atlantic Bronze Age, which likewise resist the erosion of time and
José María Rodríguez García forgetting while challenging our attempts at a final interpretation.
Duke University A vernacular practitioner of land-art avant la lettre and of masonry
as a mnemonic techné, Meijón suffered mental illness for at least
Respondents: most of his adult life.
Elia Figueroa (PhD student
in Romance Studies, Duke
Friday, April 5th at 3:30 p.m.
University)
Tyler Goldberger (Honors Alumni Memorial Commn Room, Duke Divinity School, West Campus

Senior, Duke University)

Workshop with Germán Labrador Méndez

Workshop on author´s most recent book, Culpables por la

literatura (Madrid: Akal, 2017), a thought-provoking, detailed
survey of insurgent literatures and other forms of
countercultural discourse feverishly produced as Spain evolved
from a slowly agonizing dictatorship into a formal democracy
while its burgeoning middle classes succumbed in great
numbers to an induced or subconsciously desired forgetting of
history. Labrador’s study takes account of the resurgence of
horizontal and micro-territorial forms of community and direct
democracy since roughly 2010, a time that has made us more
aware than ever before of the roads envisioned but not taken in
late 1970's Spain.

Thursday 10-11:30 a.m

Please RSVP to Workshop

With questions please contact:

Elia Romera Figueroa, elia.romera.figueroa@duke.edu