Global Arc

This course will explore witchcraft and rituality in the Americas through accusations and identity claims. We will look at how witchcraft has been used in colonial and imperial contexts to control, sanction, and extract power from women and marginalized groups in different periods, as well as how people make claims to witchcraft and rituals as a way to thwart domination. Topics include: shamanism in Latin America, the Mexican Inquisition, Afro-Latinx and Caribbean diasporic religious systems, and the contemporary social media ritual activism of "bruja feminisms." Students will be introduced to theories of race, gender, and sexuality.

This workshop will explore the theory and practice of translation, focusing on Spanish to English and, on a case-by-case basis, English to Spanish translation. Students will explore the main theoretical approaches to translation, the most common linguistic and cultural issues of Spanish and English translation; translation as a cultural intervention; and some of the nuts and bolts of translation as a profession. Students will also learn how to translate different types of texts (promotional materials, literary texts, expository and technical texts).

The figure of the drag king has been practically absent from Latinx American critical analysis. Taking what we call "spectacular masculinity" as our starting point, a hyperbolic masculinity that without warning usurps the space of privilege granted to the masculinity of men, this course revises the staging of spectacular masculinities as a possibility of generating a crisis in heterosexism. We will highlight notable antecedents of the contemporary DK show, and study the hegemonic masculinity and its exceptional models through a critical technology that turns up the volume on its dramatization and its prosthetic/cosmetic conditions.

This course studies the intersection between photography and other media in modern Latin American literature, art, and culture. It traces artistic and political uses of the photographic image as a narrative device, a document, a puzzling or deceiving representation of reality, and/or an aesthetic artifact. Among other materials, we will study and analyze art and documentary photography, fiction and non fiction texts, as well as photoessays. Readings and materials include works by Roberto Bolaño, J. L. Borges, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Graciela Iturbide, Ana Mendieta, Oscar Muñoz, Rosangela Renno, and others.

When the name Miguel de Cervantes is mentioned, readers tend to think of the character Don Quijote-his idealism or madness. But beyond that, the book stages daring critiques of ethnicity, race, religion, gender, class, and human nature. Such Cervantine works as the 'Persiles' and the 'Novelas ejemplares', as well as his theater offer equally challenging responses to the hegemonic structures of the Spanish empire. By means of these texts and their historical and philosophical contexts, this course will examine Cervantes' questioning of many of the contested social and political structures in place during the turbulent times in which he lived.

Transnational feminist approaches to globalization, race, sexuality, diaspora and nationalisms from Latinx, Black, and Asian American perspectives. Through different methodologies and interdisciplinary approaches to feminism, we will explore issues of women's and LGBTQIA rights, gender equality, globalization, capitalism, and contemporary debates around race and sexuality.

This course will explore 20th century Spanish history from the 1936 Civil War to the present, paying special attention to Francisco Franco's regime and the 1970's transition to democracy. We will discuss the social, political and cultural implications of memory and history. Dialectics between dictatorship and democracy will be at the center of the discussion. Public remembrance, memorials, social movements, gender, citizenship and neoliberal crisis are among the topics to be addressed, by means of scholarship, documentary films, fiction, art, exhibitions and literature.

This workshop-style course will focus on developing the student's skills in translating short texts from Spanish into English. Each week one or two students will present their translations from a selection of poems and short stories by writers like Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Poniatowska, Julio Cortázar, and many others. Students will also read theoretical texts about translation. Several professional translators will visit the class during the semester and present examples from their own work to the class. Prerequisite: reading knowledge of Spanish. One three-hour seminar.

An overview of recent debates about the practice of translation with special emphasis on how these ideas have been applied in translations of literary works by poets, novelists, and thinkers like Octavio Paz, Alfonso Reyes, Jorge Luis Borges, José Lezama Lima, and José Ortega y Gasset. Readings include essays on translation by Walter Benjamin, Vladimir Nabokov, Georges Steiner, and Lawrence Venutti. Students will be asked to translate a literary text from Spanish to English. Prerequisite: 307. One three-hour seminar.

This course focuses on the Spanish museographies: royal collections of objects, books and art, democratic institutions and archives, popular experiences on displaying culture agencies, critic museography and new narratives in contemporary exhibitions. Using different sources (essays, literature, catalogues, artworks, photography, films, audiovisual resources) this class will consider the museum as a relevant cultural device that shapes the social imaginaries and perceptions, in relation with gender, nation-building, the popular, nature, historical memory and democracy.