Eva Puyuelo Ureña, who was a predoctoral researcher at ADHUC, will defend her doctoral thesis Bearing Witness to Atrocity: Racial Violence and the Limits of Representation in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Works, co-supervised by Dr. Rodrigo Andrés (ADHUC-Universitat de Barcelona) and Dr. Cristina Alsina Rísquez (ADHUC-Universitat de Barcelona). Ta-Nehisi Coates’s second memoir, Between the World and Me, attracted a vast variety of different responses. Many critics celebrated Coates’s beautiful and sharp rhetoric and contended that the carefulness with which he approaches the contentious issues he deals with may in fact help a whole generation push forward; but several others used Coates’s position of enunciation to cast doubts on the legitimacy of his arguments and criticized both Coates’s pessimist stand and his understanding of racial brutality, which in his text is presented as a phenomenon that occurs almost only to cisgender heterosexual Black men. Along these lines, this dissertation draws upon the works of Ta-Nehisi Coates to study the extent to which the representation of violence in general, and of racial violence in particular, can be considered a violent act in itself, and it centralizes three main questions. To what effects is racial violence represented, and what does the representation of racial violence entail? Is there an ethical way to narrate racial violence? How does one represent racial violence without creating more violence?
Public act through Teams; it is necessary to register in advance to the email: lauravara@ub.edu.
