Global Arc

Forty years after the emergence of Gabriel García Márquez, the narrative works of the Chilean Roberto Bolaño have once again put Latin American literature at the center of the world's cultural mainstream. Quiet poet, public storyteller, and heir of Borges' most intricate speculations and the beatniks' nomadism, Bolaño broke with the recipes of magical realism and opened a fresh literary horizon by combining anti-intellecutal vitalism and erudite conceptualism. This course explores the artistic strategies of an author who made Jim Morrison dialogue with James Joyce, and went from being an anonymous eccentric to a New York Times bestseller.

A course on messianic, utopian, and revolutionary thought in and of the Caribbean. How is the idea of the Caribbean rooted in Christian thought? How have the Haitian and Cuban revolutions been shaped by religious iconography--from "voodoo" to the dove on Castro's shoulder? What is the relation between a Dominican cult and US interventions in the region? In approaching these questions, we will pair a range of literary and historical readings with philosophical considerations of messianism's and utopia's relation to politics and time.

Many definitions of culture exist. Among them is the identification of culture within the body of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterize an institution or a group of people. This course considers culture as defined by ethnicity and gender in works that confront Islam, Judaism, and Christianity in Spain, as well as the challenges of indigenous New World beliefs, both locally and abroad. Readings will include the anonymous 'Abencerraje y la Hermosa Jarifa', the aljamiado 'Tafsira' of the Mancebo de Arévalo, and Guamán Poma's visual and verbal 'Nueva corónica y buen gobierno'.

This course will explore the discursive and imaginary construction of the Amazon rainforest in Latin American cultural production. It will focus on how cultural production has contributed to the representation of the Amazon rainforest, emphasizing its environmental crisis and the struggles of indigenous peoples. While engaging with the history of Amazonia and with different cultural artifacts --including chronicles, travelogues, novels, films, and paintings-- we will study, among other topics, colonialism and neocolonialism, the modern concept of "nature", extractivism, indigenous ontologies, and ideas on the end of the world.

Diversity has sometimes been viewed as a source of vitality and strength, other times as a threat to cultural or national cohesion. This seminar explores histories of segregation and debates about diversity in a hemispheric framework, asking: how can Latin American perspectives inform our understanding of the U.S.? How has the U.S. shaped urban developments in Latin America, as a model or cautionary tale? What is the interplay between identity politics and moral values? Urbanism and ethics? How does diversity relate to inclusion, difference, and inequality? Topics include immigration, globalization, social justice, planning, race and racism.

This course introduces students to a number of traditions in critical theory from Latin America and beyond. How does ideology work? How do we understand art's relation to history and politics? How can political philosophy help us understand ongoing global conflicts and movements? Readings include selections from the Black Radical tradition, Marxism, Feminism, Subaltern Studies, Aesthetics. Authors include C.L.R. James, Theodore Adorno, Nelly Richard, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Roberto Schwarz, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, as well as select examples from literature and film.

This course studies contemporary urban poetry composed in Spanish on both sides of the Atlantic in cities such as New York, Madrid, Los Angeles, Mexico D.F., Barcelona and Buenos Aires. It focuses on lyrical practices that combine sound and language in a wide range of literary expressions. Contemporary hip-hop poetry and rap lyrics are at the center of the course.

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.