Lightning Talks Feature Scholarship on Freedom, Desire, Empire, and Renewal

The College of Humanities’ illuminating Lightning Talks series offers fast-paced presentations of research spanning languages, regions, and eras. In sharp 15-minute sessions, each built around a single image or artifact, new faculty and postdoctoral fellows brought their scholarship to life for the wider University of Utah community. The October 17 program captured the breadth of the College’s intellectual energy.

“On Settler Freedom” — María Laura Martinelli, World Languages and Cultures 
Ángel Della Valle’s large 1892 oil painting, The Return of the Indian Raid (La vuelta del malón)—displayed at the Chicago World’s Fair and now in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires—is an occasion to probe the ideals of freedom espoused by New World settlers. Charging across a vast, empty landscape, indigenous warriors carry off a luminous, nearly nude white woman and a processional cross, among other spoils of war. Martinelli argues that this painting and other captivity narratives reflect what she calls settler freedom: a paradoxical freedom grounded in domination, private property, and the erasure of indigenous presence. Della Valle’s painting depicts the settler imagination of “too much freedom” enjoyed by indigenous peoples as violent, predatory, and in need of containment. By contrast, settler freedom is imagined as virtuous and civilizing. These dual visions of liberty, Martinelli notes, still echo today in the politics of Argentina, where “freedom” is invoked not against domination, but in defense of it. 

“The Sex Lives of Russian Classics” — Fiona Bell, World Languages and Cultures
Bell’s talk examines the Avon “Red and Gold” pulp edition of Leo Tolstoy’s Polikushka and Two Hussars, published in the 1950s with a “cheesecake” pinup-style cover of a scantily clad woman and lusty cavalrymen. She shows how the marketing of this edition reframed Tolstoy’s abolitionist tragedy, Polikushka, and his morally serious Two Hussars as titillating tales of sex and intrigue. This eroticized reception contrasts with Tolstoy’s own late-career rejection of the novel form as complicit in bourgeois sexual decadence. Bell also highlights how his later novel, Resurrection, intended as a critique of Russia’s penal system, was instead received in the United States as a scandalous love story and adapted by Hollywood with heavily racialized tropes. Such pulp editions and film adaptations, Bell argues, reveal how Russian classics were marketed in midcentury America as both high culture and lurid spectacle. 

“‘Revolution at the University’: Algerian University Students and Anticolonial Protest in the Early 1960s” — Catalina “Kiki” Mackaman-Lofland, History 
Mackaman-Lofland examines the role of the colonial French University of Algiers in the history of anti-colonial politics. Focusing on the years during and after the war for independence, she shows how the minority Algerian student population—studying within a majority colonial student body—became a formative force, from their influential 1956 strike through the post-independence 1963 Congress of the General Union of Muslim Algerian Students. At that congress, they removed the colonial label “Muslim” from their name, renaming themselves the National Union of Algerian Students. In this context, “Muslim” had marked their lack of French citizenship as much as religious identity. Declaring themselves “intellectual workers” in support of Algeria’s socialist revolution, students articulated not only a post-independence agenda for internal reform but also an explicitly anti-imperial foreign policy that positioned Algeria as a leader in the global struggle against imperialism, colonialism, and war. The banner at their congress—“For an Anti-Imperialist Front”—captures the scope of their ambitions, reaching well beyond national independence. 

“Broken Buddha: When Buddhism Meets Politics” — Max Brandstadt, Religious Studies, World Languages and Cultures
Amidst numerous other Buddhist statues at the Minneapolis Art Institute is one labeled simply “Figure of a Bodhisattva, Sui Dynasty, 6th-century China.” Unlike most others, however, the object is in fact a composite: the Bodhisattva figure stands on a plinth inscribed in 570 CE by patrons who had commissioned a Buddha image. Brandstadt shows the significance of this striking composition: Whereas a Buddha is a fully enlightened being depicted with austere simplicity, a Bodhisattva is on the path to enlightenment yet only partway there, and is shown in rich, regal ornamentation. The mismatch, Brandstadt suggests, reflects the violent persecution of Buddhism at the time, when monasteries were closed and artworks were destroyed. The base likely once supported a smashed Buddha, and was later reused for a different figure after the revival of Buddhism in China. As Brandstadt explains, this “broken Buddha” illustrates the precarious place of Buddhism in medieval China, the power of the imperial state to suppress or promote religion, and the dialectic of impermanence and renewal central to Buddhist thought.