Annual Tagore Lecture 'Mexican Apocalypses: 2023 | 1521 | 14,000 BC'

Mexico with its cataclysmic colonial past and today’s endemic violence as well as environmental challenges evokes apocalyptic narratives and images, both in the distorted Eurocentric perspective, and in Mexican reflections on its past, present and future. In my talk, I use Mexican art work from different time periods to tease out the particular temporality of Apocalypse in which the present folds back onto the past. I argue that, unlike notions based on linear temporality like the Anthropocene or extinction narratives, Apocalypse, as a story and imaginary that gives sense and shape to events to immense for our cognition or experience, has the potential for thinking of a radically different future.

ABOUT THE LECTURE SERIES
The UCL Rabindranath Tagore Lecture in Comparative Literature is delivered annually by a scholar of international distinction. It celebrates the poet, playwright, painter and musician Rabindranath Tagore, whose eminent figure looms large in the history of UCL, a university which he joined briefly, in 1878, to read law and which he left without a degree. One hundred forty years later, Tagore is widely hailed as a model of the radical spirit that informs comparative literature in an age of shifting global cultural and political constellations. Tagore’s heroic vision of world literature (visva bharati) opposes hate-mongering nationalism at every level. His celebration of artistic creativity as wasteful spending (bājē kharaca) seeks to preserve the exuberance of poetic invention across all fields of inquiry and takes the excitement of drama, poetry, song and painting into society – and into the classroom and the lecture theatre.

Jointly hosted by the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies and the the School of European, Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS), with generous support from UCL Global Engagement.