La ciudad vencida y El Caracazo, an interview with Yeniter Poleo
On November 1st of 2018, students of the undergraduate course “Violence and Unrest in the Latin American Lettered City” interviewed Yeniter Poleo via videoconference. Poleo, author of the novel La ciudad vencida (2014), joined the course from Caracas, Venezuela, where she currently works as an independent journalist and as a human rights activist. Students discussed with her the aesthetic and political challenges that she faced narrating “El Caracazo”—a popular uprising that occurred in 1989 and transformed Venezuelan history. The discussion also addressed recurrent topics of the class like contemporary urban violence in Caracas, Latin-American social memory, and the relationship between literature and activism.
This event was sponsored by the Department of Romance Languages, and organized by Héctor Melo, Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow.