Global Arc

This course will offer a cultural history of how Havana evolved from a sleepy colonial city in 1900 to rising as one of the cultural and architectural capitals of Latin America and the world by the 1950s. We will study the urban development of the early 20th century, the adoption of modernism and International Style in architecture, and the tensions between private enterprise and public projects.

This seminar examines the ethical and historical dimensions of the 2019 Summer Puerto Rican Protests. Developing within an ongoing financial catastrophe and the trauma of Hurricane María, most issues raised today are deeply rooted in the history of U.S. imperial domination since 1898. The course aims to rethink questions of second-class citizenship, colonial capitalism, militarization, ecocide and massive migrations, as well as gender, sexual and racial inequalities. Special focus on how musical, artistic, religious, political, and literary traditions shape memory and resistance in Puerto Rico and in its vast diasporic communities.

Film is comprised of multiple surfaces: the screen, the actors, the structure of the darkroom, the mobile devices of the audiovisual present, the bodies that vibrate around us, the actual strip of plastic that records the images... Critics have already broadly debated how film touches us politically and emotionally. This seminar formulates a different question: how do we touch film? In Latin America, the interaction between filmic skins is founded on the relationship between art and politics. We will consider how filmmakers debate the politics of the surface and how spectatorship poses a deeply political problem for the region.

The beginning of the millennium has brought new and refreshing approaches to fiction and non-fiction writing. We will examine recent novels in various genres: historical novel, testimonial poetry, auto-fiction, political narrative, chronicles, essays and also hybrids like storytelling podcasts and artist's books. In addition to reading and reflecting on these works, we will talk (in person or by Skype) with all the authors.

This class will use Andrés Barba's novel, A Luminous Republic (2019) as a case study to examine how one writes a novel. We will examine the writing process, the editorial review and the final publishing of the book. We will analyze, step by step, the entire journey: the research process, the first drafts, the possible endings, the editing and publication of the final work, the agent's mission, the approach to criticism, the dilemmas of translation into other languages and formats. A 360 degree approach that combines aspects of writing workshop, thinking workshop, translation and literary criticism

Mario Vargas Llosa, who received the Nobel prize in 2010, is the most important living writer in Latin America. His novels offer a unique perspective on 20th century Latin American history and politics, and deal with issues that include: dictatorship, Marxism, the conflicts between rich and poor, the left and the right, and gender stereotypes and dynamics. This seminar will offer an overview of his political fiction.

As on the entire planet, the tragic coronavirus pandemic has profoundly affected social relations, the interpretations of the present, and the imagination of the future in Spain. In this course we will explore narratives around the COVID-19 as part of a cultural trend of using dystopian and apocalyptic imagery to represent contemporary reality and possible futures. Through the analysis of texts of different genres (literature, cinema, television, etc.) published between the beginning of the 21st century and 2020, we will discuss the role of culture in the current state of emergency as well as in other moments of crisis.

Latin America is a land of poets who believe in the power of language and the craft of verse. If, according to Vicente Huidobro, the poet is a little god who can create new worlds with words, revolutionary poet Roque Dalton believed that poetry could change history. "La poesía es como el pan; debe ser compartido por todos," said Neruda. This course offers a brief history of modern Spanish American poetry from modernismo to slam poetry through a stellar row of Latin American poets and Nobel awardees, including César Vallejo, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Alejandra Pizarnik, Jorge Luis Borges, Roque Dalton, and Cecilia Vicuña.

This seminar explores darkening technologies in contemporary Latin America as the main tools of a new poetics that strongly challenges vision and its alleged ability to "clearly" generate knowledge. We will explore a variety of artifacts that discard the eyes in favor of experiences of blindness, obscured vision, and tactile sensation that interrogate the visual imperative. I propose that opacity, darkness, and blindness are poetic mechanisms that can stand up to the authoritarian regime of vision and question the insidious ways in which light suffuses peripheral knowledge, politics, and bodies.

Does the coronavirus emergency irretrievably change our way to see and act in the society? Is the way we experience this crisis completely new, or does it have any link with our past experiences? In this course we will explore different cultural responses to the COVID-19 pandemic (and its likely traditions), such as the use of apocalyptic imagery to represent the crisis, the recurrence of technocratic considerations around the "govern of the experts," conspiracy discourses that reproduce dystopic readings of the world, and diverse creative paths to contest deterministic interpretation of the post-pandemic future.