Mar 28, 2024  
Catalogue 2020-2021 
    
Catalogue 2020-2021 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

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LALS 229 - Postcolonial Latin America

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as HISP 229 ) Studies in Latin American literary and cultural production from the emergence of the nation states to the present. Thematically structured, the course delves into the social, political, and institutional processes undergone by Latin America as a result of its uneven incorporation into world capitalist development.

Topic for 2020/21a: Animals in Caribbean and Mexican Literature and Visual Culture. The course examines the presence and role of animals in the colonial and postcolonial histories, literatures, and cultures of the Caribbean and Latin America, from Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo to Homero Aridjis. We look at how interactions between humans and other animals have significantly shaped narratives and visual cultures in the region and work through the methodological implications of centering animals within narrative and artistic representations. Topics include indigenous cosmologies, the politics of hunting, the commodification of animals and animal parts, the protection of animals and the environment, posthumanism, and notions of wildlife. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert.

Topic for 2020/21b: Post- Human Futures: New Latin American Literature. In Latin America, as anywhere else, we begin the third decade of the 21st century with an uneasy eye on the horizon. The future—of the region, politics, literature, the planet, the human—lies ahead as an open question that requires a speculative imagination to be answered. In this class, we read a series of works of literature from the last 15 years coming from the Caribbean, as well as North, Central and South America that have imagined possible paths to the future, where, after “all that is solid melts into air,” new forms of the human and their relation to each other, technology, and the planet can be conjured. We read poetry and fiction by Rita Indiana, Dolores Dorantes, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Lina Meruane, and Samantha Schweblin, among others. Instruction, materials, and evaluation in this class are in Spanish. Marcela Romero Rivera.

Prerequisite(s): HISP 216  or HISP 219 .

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS



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