Report: Day of the (un)Dead, University of Cambridge Festival of Ideas

Saturday 2 November 2013

CLAS has taken part in this year's Festival of Ideas, with a presentation exploring Mexican speculative fiction. Organised to coincide with the Day of the Dead, this event showcased some disconcerting stories of terror, science fiction and the fantastic in contemporary Mexican literature.

Independent scholar Adriana Alexander began by explaining the celebration of the Day of the Dead in Mexico and the country's particular relationship with death and horror, looking at how this is manifested in Juan Rulfo's canonical work, Pedro Paramo. Cherilyn Elston, a PhD student at CLAS, continued the discussion by exploring the legacy of these deathly narratives in a new generation of Mexican writers, who have been translated into English as part of the online translation project Palabras Errantes.

After readings by two of the translators, Elsa Treviño and Rachel Randall, there was a lively discussion with members of the public.