Jorge Diego Sánchez, member of Hospitality in European Film project, gave a guest lecture entitled “Desmontando India: Reescrituras postcoloniales del Imperio Británico” (“Dismantling India: Postcolonial Rewritings of the British Empire”) which closed the Seminar Historia(s) en lengua inglesa: Resiliencia y Precariedad (History/Stories in English Language: Resilience and Precariousness). He illustrated how contemporary political and media standpoints both in India and the United Kingdom are currently interwoven and how hospitality and fear were implemented (or not) in the British Empire and its Indian arrivals and farewells.
He studied different instances from European film productions such as John Madden’s Best Marigold Hotel (2011), Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008) or Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982) as well as music videoclips like Ben Ori’s vision of Coldplay’s “Hymn for the Weekend” (2015) to assess the current relation of how people from abroad are presented in contemporary European productions. The talk raised an interesting forum to discuss the relevance of Gurinder Chadha’s depiction of hospitality and hostility in her production Viceroy’s House (2017).
The Seminar Historia(s) en lengua inglesa: Resiliencia y Precariedad (History/Stories in English Language: Resilience and Precariousness) gathered 74 students from Feb 9th (2018) to April 20th (2018) and was organised by the Department of English Studies at University of Salamanca (USAL), the International Seminar of Contemporary History of Human Rights at USAL (Seminario Internacional de Historia Contemporánea de los Derechos Humanos, USAL) and the research project “Narratives of Resilience” (MINECO: FFI2015-63895-C2-2-R). The pedagogical outcomes and impact can be highlighted in the relevance of the interdisciplinary nature of attendees as well as the speakers.
