HISP 206 - Reading and Writing about Hispanic Culture

Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2025/26a: Censorship and Human Rights in Latin America. Human rights literature assumes a deeply personal yet collective voice that situates itself within the broad expanse of communal history. This semester, we explore several literary texts that encompass the human experience of suffering and redemption through an aesthetic that urges responsibility and action on the reader’s part, as well as critical thinking and responsiveness.

The selection of works we analyze demonstrates the power of literature to denounce and question, defy censorship, and expose the moral void in which abuses have occurred. This course examines a variety of texts and cultural artifacts—including testimonial narratives, short stories, novels, and visual arts projects—to explore issues of subjectivity, memory, and subalternity in Latin America’s extensive history of oppression. Nicolas Vivalda.

Topic for 2025/26b: Desbordes: Undoing Patriarchy in Latin America. Contemporary anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, and anti-colonial collectives, authors, and artists are changing the socio-political landscape of Latin America from the ground up. In this course we pay attention to how these activists undo and overflow patriarchal borders to create new territories of dissent and communality. While developing reading, writing, and speaking skills in Spanish, we analyze the works of various collectives, authors, and artists, to map this current affective cartography of Latin America. Materials range from comic strips, performance, short stories, poems, music videos, to essays, manifestos and calls to action. By the end of the course, students are able to engage with Latin American feminist theories, identify major interventions, and write short essays towards undoing patriarchy in Latin America. Montserrat Madariaga-Caro.

Two 75-minute periods and one hour of conversation.

Course Format: CLS