In his guest lecture, Prof. Dr. Hoyos examines Gabriel García Márquez’s short story “Big Mama’s Funeral” to explore the intersections of literature, law, and anticolonial thought. Through two contrasting interpretations of the text, he considers how narratives of sovereignty and excess illuminate the challenges of representing constituent power, proposing that the story’s playful and hyperaesthetic dimensions reveal how the gap between words and deeds can itself become a source of creative and critical potential.

Prof. Dr. Hoyos is Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures and Comparative Literature at Stanford University, and Director of both the Center for Latin American Studies and the Center for the Study of the Novel.