College professors win book awards

LAWRENCE — Verónica Garibotto, assistant professor of Spanish & Portuguese, has won the 2013 Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Studies Book Publication Award for her upcoming publication "Crisis and Reemergence: The Nineteenth Century in Contemporary Southern Cone Fiction," to be published in Spanish by Purdue University Press. The annual award is administered by the Hall Center for the Humanities.

The book is a political examination of a noticeable recent phenomenon in the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay): the re-emergence of the 19th century in contemporary fiction. Popular 19th-century figures and heroes (indios, gauchos, letrados, cautivas) are appearing in the literary scene; popular 19th-century texts are being rewritten; important 19th-century genres are being transformed and recycled. Garibotto’s book seeks to answer two questions: Why did the 19th century resurface so strongly in recent decades? What are the implications of this re-emergence?

Garibotto’s study uses cultural Marxism, discourse analysis and post-colonial theory to understand the key political ideas at the center of 19th century Southern Cone culture, to show how these ideas continued into the 1990s, and to look at these ideas’ recent transformation, which has led to the so-called “return of the political” to the region.

The University of Kansas Office of Research & Graduate Studies sponsors the Vice Chancellor for Research & Graduate Studies Book Publication Award.  It is intended to assist in the publication of meritorious book manuscripts by KU faculty members in the humanities.

The Friends of the Hall Center provide support for a second faculty publication. Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages & Cultures Hui Faye Xiao received the Friends Book Publication Award for "Family Revolution in Post-Revolutionary China: Divorce in Literature and Visual Culture, 1980-2010." This book will be the first full-length qualitative study of divorce narratives in Chinese fiction and will reveal new knowledge of sociocultural transformations of post-revolutionary China.

Using literary, gender, film and cultural studies, the book contends that the concept of “divorce” is represented as a central trope of national crisis, social change, gender transformation and individualism in modern Chinese history. Xiao argues that divorce in the Chinese cultural imagination represents an intersection of the public and the private, the old and the new, and the traditional and the revolutionary.

The additional publication award is made possible by the Friends of the Hall Center, an organization of faculty, community members and students who support the Center’s programs.