Edgar Garcia - "Emergency" - Mark Payne

Edgar Garcia will discuss Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis. He will be joined in conversation by Mark Payne.

This event will be held in person at the Seminary C-op. Masks are required for all attendees.

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About the book: Nine short essays exploring the K’iche’ Maya story of creation, the Popol Vuh. Written during the lockdown in Chicago in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, these essays consider the Popol Vuh as a work that was also written during a time of feverish social, political, and epidemiological crisis as Spanish missionaries and colonial military deepened their conquest of indigenous peoples and cultures in Mesoamerica. What separates the Popol Vuh from many other creation texts is the disposition of the gods engaged in creation. Whereas the book of Genesis is declarative in telling the story of the world’s creation, the Popol Vuh is interrogative and analytical: the gods, for example, question whether people actually need to be created, given the many perfect animals they have already placed on earth. Emergency uses the historical emergency of the Popol Vuh to frame the ongoing emergencies of colonialism that have surfaced all too clearly in the global health crisis of COVID-19. In doing so, these essays reveal how the authors of the Popol Vuh—while implicated in deep social crisis—nonetheless insisted on transforming emergency into scenes of social, political, and intellectual emergence, translating crisis into creativity and world creation.

About the author: Edgar Garcia is the author of Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence Books, 2019); Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2020); and Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022). He is Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago, where he is also Director of Undergraduate Studies in Creative Writing. In 2022 he is editor in chief of Fence.

About the interlocutor: Mark Payne is a professor in the departments of Comparative Literature, Classics, and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction, The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination, winner of the 2011 Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism, and Flowers of Time: On Postapocalyptic Fiction. With Brooke Holmes of Princeton University, he is coeditor of the Critical Antiquities series published by the University of Chicago Press.