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Dr Amit Thakkar

Lecturer in Hispanic Studies

Degree: BA (Birmingham), MA (King's College, London), PhD (Liverpool)

Associated research centres and groups: Centre for Gender and Women's Studies, Film Studies, Latin America Research Cluster, Literature and Film, Literature and Theory

Current Teaching

• SPAN100/101: History and Culture of Spain and Spanish America
• SPAN233: Power and Resistance in Spain and Spanish America
• SPAN 240: Latin America on Film (1968-2003)
• DELC340: Approaches Towards Violence in Spanish and Latin American Film(PROPOSAL UNDER REVIEW to replace SPAN240)
• SPAN 301: Final-Year Translation Spanish to English

Research Interests

I research Spanish and Latin American film and literature.

My current interest is 'cine de choque', a term I have used for films by Spanish-speaking film directors in which car crashes feature. The first step is an article on the Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar's 'Abre los ojos', which I have just completed.

I also research the relationship between masculinities and violence in Latin American film. I have a published article on Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's 'Memorias del subdesarrollo' and I am now working on Alejandro González Iñárritu's 'Amores perros'.

I have also published two articles on the fiction of the Mexican author Juan Rulfo, one on the figure of the teacher in the short story 'Luvina' and the other on the priest in the novel 'Pedro Páramo'. I have just completed a book on irony, revolution and postcolonialism in Rulfo's work (currently under review).

I am also working on an article on the application of irony in the Spanish novelist Miguel Delibes' Cinco Horas con Mario.

These are my recent and forthcoming publications:

• Monographs, Edited Volumes etc.

The Fiction ofJuan Rulfo: Irony, Revolution and Postcolonialism (under review).

Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (Liverpool), Special Edition: Masculinities and Violence in Latin American Cultures, with Chris Harris, co-editor, Volume 87.6, September 2010.

• Recent Articles

'Cine de choque: Image Culture and the Absence of the Patriarch in Alejandro Amenábar's Abre los ojos (1997)' (currently under review).

'Structural Violence, Masculinities and the Hunting Motif in Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's Memorias del subdesarrollo (1968)', Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Volume 87.6, September 2010.

'One Rainy Market Day: Integration and Indigenous Peoples in the Fiction and Thought of Juan Rulfo' in VictoriaCarpenter(ed.) (Re)Collecting the Past, History and Collective Memory in Latin American Narrative. Hispanic Studies: Culture and Ideas (31). Peter Lang, Oxford, pp. 191-216.

'Irony and the Priest in Fragment 14 of Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo', Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (Liverpool), Volume 83.2, April 2006.

'Ambivalence and the Crisis of the Mimic Man: Centrifugal Irony in Juan Rulfo's 'Luvina'', Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies , Vol 11, No. 1, April 2005.

• Review Articles

'Death and Modernity in Modern Mexico'. Review article commisioned by Journal of Cultural Studies (Routledge) on Claudio Lomnitz, Death and the Idea of Mexico, (Zone Books, 2005) and Rubén Gallo, Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution (MIT Press, 2005). Forthcoming in 2010.

• Reviews

Craven, David, Art and Revolution in Latin America 1910-1990, reviewed in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (Liverpool), 81, 1 (2004).

Fuentes, Carlos, et al, Juan Rulfo's Mexico, reviewed commissioned by the Journal of Latin American Studies (London), Vol. 36, II, May 2004.

Potential Doctoral Proposals

Spanish and Latin American Literature and Film (masculinities, violence, irony,postcolonial theory, revolution)

MAVLAC (Masculinities and Violence in Latin American Cultures)

I am currently collaborating with Dr Chris Harris of Liverpool University on a cross-institutional project on masculinities and violencein Latin American cultures.

The first stage of the project was a conference in Liverpool's 2008 conference for the Society for Latin American Studies. After a call for papers this year, we will be publishing a special edition of the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies in September 2010 (see above for publication details).

There will be a symposium in Lancasteron December 10th of the same year and a conference is planned in 2012. The symposium is funded by the Joint Initiative for the Study of Latin America and the Carribean (www.jislac.org.uk).

A MAVLACwebsite is under construction and further publications are planned.

Car Crashes and the Choque Aesthetic in Spanish and Spanish American Film

I am exploring films in which crashes feature as a pivotal plot device. I am principally interested in films from the mid-1990s to the present as this is a period when such films have become especially prevalent. Currently I am considering Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores perros (2002) and Alejandro Amenábar's Abre los ojos (1997).

I am particularly interested in the spaces between Freud's dreamwork, Metz's 'filmic state' and Luckhurst's 'aesthetic of trauma'. Within these spaces I argue that there exists a certain choque aesthetic,a term I have coined to denote particular characteristics of Spanish-language films in which crashes feature. After I complete my work on Amores perros and Abre los ojos, I will turn my attention to another comparative work, this time comparing Hispanic takes on the crash motif with Hollywood takes (for example, Changing Lanes (2002), Crash (1996) and Crash (2004)).

Irony and Fiction under Authoritarian Regimes

For a decade now, I have been working on the fiction of Juan Rulfo, particularly in the context of irony, revolution and postcolonialism. My work has produced an original concept of irony based on Bakhtin's cetripetal and centrifugal forces. The targets of centripetal irony are encountered 'within' a text. These instances of centripetal irony usually concern a character, a situation or piece of dialogue within the story space. The targets of centrifugal irony are usually located in the social, political and historical contexts of the text (eg. land reform, education policy, caciquismo, the Church etc.). The two types of irony are not mutually exclusive. It may be more helpful to think of them in terms of a continuum. Indeed, they work together in that the apprehension of centripetal irony trains the reader to understand, and indeed seek, centrifugal ironies, particularly those which concern revolutionary rhetoric and the legacy of colony, in the case of Juan Rulfo. This theory is explored in my two articles on Rulfo, as above, and a manuscript currently under review (The Fiction of Juan Rulfo: Irony, Revolution and Postcolonialism). I am now working on extending this project on irony to post-Civil War Spanish writers, starting with an articleon Miguel Delibes' Cinco Horas con Mario. The aim is to explore the potential for the centripetal-centrifugal paradigm to be applied to fiction outside Latin America.

I have also produced the first analysis of Rulfo's fiction in light of his thoughts on indigenous peoples, as expressed in several interviews during his period at the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (1962-1986) in 'One Rainy Market Day: Integration and Indigenous Peoples in the Fiction and Thought of Juan Rulfo'. I argue here that, rather than Rulfo's own (unelaborated) concept of inframundo, Guillermo Bonfil Batalla's concepts of México profundo and México imaginario are of most relevance to the one passage in which indigenous characters appear in Rulfo's work. I also discuss Rulfo's notion of 'integración', especially in connection withthe Spanish root word 'íntegro', producing the original argument that Rulfo's'integración' is even further from assimilation than the modern notion of the word usually suggests. It has much more to do with 'wholeness' and therefore integration within one's own community than it has to do with integration within any host community.

I have recently written a short piece on Rulfo's life and works: http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=11993(login required)

Eprints Publications Repository and Bibliographic Database

Amit Thakkar has 6 selected publication records listed on this webpage. Use links to access abstracts and full text where available. View all records to sort by date, type and title. For all ePrints records go to http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk

Thakkar, Amit (2010) Structural violence, masculinities and the hunting motif in Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's "Memorias del subdesarrollo" (1968). Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 87 (6). pp. 705-723. ISSN 1475-3839

Thakkar, Amit (2009) One rainy market day: 'integration' and the indigenous community in the fiction and thought of Juan Rulfo. In: (Re)Collecting the Past, History and Collective Memory in Latin American Narrative. Hispanic Studies: Culture and Ideas (31). Peter Lang, Oxford, pp. 191-216. ISBN 978-3-03911-928-8

Thakkar, Amit (2006) Irony and the Priest in Fragment 14 of Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 83 (2). pp. 203-223. ISSN 1475-3839

Thakkar, Amit (2005) Ambivalence and the Crisis of the Mimic Man: Centrifugal Irony in Juan Rulfo's 'Luvina'. Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 11 (1). pp. 65-89. ISSN 1469-9524

Thakkar, Amit (2009) "Juan Rulfo". UNSPECIFIED.

Other Interests and Hobbies

Film and music.

Associated Keywords: Art, Art/cultural history, Cinema, Colonialism, Comparative literature, Hispanic studies, Identity, Latin American cultural studies, Literary theory, Literature, Masculinities, Photography, Postcolonial literature, Postcolonial theory, Spanish, Violence

View all research activities, ePrints, news and events associated with Amit Thakkar.

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