Tuesday 21 October 2025, 1.45pm - 3.15pm
Kloppenberg Room, Cohen Quad, Exeter College
1.45pm - 2pm refreshments
2pm - 3.15pm seminar
See event poster here.
Hurricanes and typhoons as colonial tempests science, warfare and eco-translation in the making of hurakán culture in Havana and Manila
Yairen Jerez Columbié (University College, Cork)
On September 11, 1875, Catalan-Cuban Jesuit priest and scientist Benito Viñes Martorell published a hurricane warning in the newspaper La Voz de Cuba, in Havana. The first hurricane warning ever issued gave notice of the expected route and impacts of a storm that had formed in the Caribbean and signalled the beginning of modern Meteorology. This seminar discusses translatory movements in the sky and on the page by interrogating Catalan-Cuban contributions to hurakán/hurricane culture in nineteenth-century colonial Cuba vis-á-vis similar developments in Manila, in the Philippine Archipelago. I explore the parallel evolution of meteorology and cultural representations of storms during the late nineteenth century in direct relation with the CubaSpain-Philippines-US war (1898–1902) and US military occupations. The cultural products and the example of eco-translation discussed in this seminar aim to answer the question about the place of both hurricanes and typhoons in the making of hurakán/hurricane culture through an exploration of the relations between the Manila and Havana observatories. Their intellectuals’ centrality within the configuration of Meteorology as a colonial discipline and their relentless work for protecting not only goods, but also lives, in the Caribbean and the Philippine archipelagos, reveal their contradictory roles moving between empires and territories seeking liberation. These intellectuals’ paradoxical positioning shaped their scientific studies and their wider cultural production, which are the genesis of contemporary hurakán/hurricane culture, a concept that I have proposed and explored in a wider project as the set of cultural representations and practices that people from diverse walks of life, and with different levels of vulnerability to disasters, have yielded to understand and survive the onslaughts of tropical storms and the still ongoing long-standing imperial tempest.
Dr Yairen Jerez Columbié works as Lecturer in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at University College Cork. She is the author of the monographic book Essays on Transculturation and Catalan-Cuban Intellectual History (Palgrave, 2021) and of the books of poetry Fósiles de lluvia (Betania, 2022) and De corales (Betania, 2024). Her recently submitted monographic manuscript Hurricane Culture: for an Eco-Poetics of Relations beyond the Hispanic Caribbean is under contract with University of Toronto Press.
Caribbean Studies Network, TORCH Networks
