TALK with Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy

For the bookshop inventory of Untitled, our director, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, has selected epistolary novels that were part of the curatorial research of A group exhibition with work by Dora García, Sharon Hayes, Emily Jacir, Mahmoud Khaled, Carlos Motta, Wu Tsang, and Akram Zaatari, as well as letter by Quinn Latimer. Join her in conversation this evening, as she presents these books and discusses their critical reception at the time of publication, and suggests their relevance at present, when electronic missives are, by and large, commonplace.

In her presentation, Sofía will especially focus on two running threads in the subtext of early epistolary, which suggest affects of an incipient globalization: on the one hand, the description of a given cultural breach, and not just of geographical separation, that marked the distances between correspondents; and, on the other hand, the ways in which authorship or truthfulness was contended. Among the titles discussed will be The Portuguese Letters (1669) attributed to Mariana Alcoforado and Letters from a Peruvian Woman (1748) by Françoise De Graffigny, as well as So Long a Letter (1980) by Mariama Bâ and I Love Dick (2007) by Chris Kraus.