Scholar joins UO faculty author for Books-in-Print talk

In interwar Paris, the encounter between surrealism and the emerging discipline of ethnology led to an intellectual project now known as “ethnographic surrealism.” In her book, The Persistence of Masks: Surrealism and the Ethnography of the Subject (University of Minnesota Press, October 2025), Joyce Suechun Cheng considers the ethnographic dimension of the surrealist movement in its formative years. Analyzing surrealist aesthetic criticism, art, poetry, and field research in terms of a common interest in marginalized modes of subjectivity, Cheng argues that the surrealists used the figures of the mask, the veil, the hand, and the hat to radically reconceive the subject as nonhegemonic, nonanthropocentric, and feminine-identified. 

Joyce Suechun Cheng, Associate Professor of the History of Art and Architecture, conducts research and teaches in the visual arts, poetics, and aesthetic theories of international modernism and avant-gardes. On Friday, January 23, 2026 she will give a Books-in-Print talk at 12 p.m. in 159 PLC. Cheng will be joined by Edgar Garcia, Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago and a poet and scholar of the hemispheric cultures of the Americas. 

Garcia works on the literatures and cultural practices that tend not to be taken seriously as literature and culture: the contemporary literature, visual art, legal philosophy, and environmental thinking of non-alphabetical sign systems such as pictographs and khipu; dreams; practices and textual formations of divination; magic; and creation stories. His scholarship and creative practices are concerned with the world-bearing qualities of literary works (especially poetics)—taking place at the intersection of anthropology and literary studies. 

Cheng and Garcia will be engaged in a discussion of her book, informed by their shared approach to poetics and aesthetics through the lens of anthropology. In addition to participating in Cheng’s book talk, Garcia will give a public lecture titled “Migrant Glyphs,” the same evening at 5:30 p.m. in 110 Willamette Hall. In this storytelling talk Garcia will explore some geoglyphs in the Sonoran Desert and their life at the intersection of indigeneity and migration in the Americas. 

These free events are supported by the OHC’s Endowment for Public Outreach in the Arts, Sciences and Humanities. Please register for the book talk below.