Exile, Empire & Resistance: YURI HERRERA on Benito Juarez & Today's Political Crises

What happens when Mexico's future president lands in New Orleans, a city of operas, slave markets, and radical musical invention? A man who spoke a variant of Zapotec and read the French philosophers of the Enlightenment finds himself adrift in the hallucinatory swamps of New Orleans.

In this episode of Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu speaks with novelist, essayist, and scholar Yuri Herrera about his new novel, Season of the Swamp, which is a deeply researched and dazzlingly imagined account of Benito Juarez’s time spent in exile in New Orleans. We learn about what that time and place offered to Juarez’s understanding of a world coming into being—one of créolité and carnival, of mixedness and multiplicity, and what these sometimes hallucinatory moments offered his political vision. They talk about what kinds of new visions of freedom are discovered in the midst of forms of slavery that horrify Juarez. We hear how all of this relates to the present day—to the genocide in Gaza, the violent ICE attacks in the United States, and the descent into unbridled, and unmasked fascism.

Yuri Herrera's first three novels have been translated into several languages: Kingdom Cons, Signs Preceding the End of the World, and Transmigration of Bodies. In 2016 he shared with translator Lisa Dillman the Best translated Book Award for the translation of Signs Preceding the End of the World. That same year he received the Anna Seghers Prize at the Academy of Arts of Berlin, for the body of his work. His latest books are A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire, Ten Planets, and Season of the Swamp. He is a professor of creative writing and literature at Tulane University, in New Orleans.

(0:00) The Season of the Swamp

(3:55) Benito Juarez’s Life, his indigenous roots and his conflict with dictator Santana.

(7:00) Yuri Herrera's relationship with New Orleans and the theme of extreme migration.

(11:00) An Accidental Avant-Garde How the clash of European classical music and African drumming in Congo Square created a new space for imagination.

(15:30) Individual Freedom vs. Slavery

(19:30) Ocampo the Socialist Vampire Slayer Symbolic dreams in the novel and the rebellious resilience of New Orleans.

(24:10) The Art of Translation

(27:25) Reading from the novel

(33:30) Democratizing the Gaze Why the author chose not to use Juarez's name in order to strip away the monument and reveal the tender, perceptive migrant.

(39:30) Modern Fascism and Cruelty Connecting history to the ICE attacks and global resistance.

(45:00) The Last Gringo Reflecting on a short story about language, power and the changing face of America.

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