2007–2008 Latin-American and Latino/a Studies Courses
Courses in Related Disciplines
Borders, Boundaries, and Belonging
Level: Open
Semester: Year
International boundaries are often taken to be fixed and unchanging demarcations of nation-states and the quintessential expression of national sovereignty. This course examines how physical and social boundaries are made and policed through immigration controls. We begin by studying theories of international migration in order to understand how globalization has accelerated the flows of money and people around the world. Why do people migrate? How do economic, political, cultural, and social transnational linkages shape international migration? What are forced and voluntary migrations? Next we turn to the historical development of border controls in the early twentieth-century period of nation-state formation through the post 9/11 period. Why do we use passports? How are borders policed? How do techniques and practices such as classification, apprehension, detention, and deportation factor into the migration process? What is the role of border agents, human smugglers, NGOs, and private citizens in regulating the movement of people across international borders? Finally, we will investigate the construction of social boundaries and the process of citizenship making. How do everyday practices of boundary policing generate distinctions between licit and illicit flows and differences between citizens and noncitizens? How are immigrants and their children transforming traditional understandings of membership and belonging? We will ground our inquiry in texts analyzing immigration controls in the receiving countries from select regions in North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Borrachita me voy: Mexico at the Crossroads
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
With the advent of the Mexican Revolution in the early twentieth century, Mexico becomes the source of endless fascination and the locus for an enormous political, social, and cultural ferment of truly international dimensions. Over four decades (roughly 1909 to 1959), political upheavals are threaded with the surprising figures who coincide there, cross paths, leave their mark—John Reed, Trostky, Neruda, Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, Sergei Eisenstein, Luis Buñuel and the many exiles from the Spanish Civil War, Angelina Beloff, Carrington, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, et al. At the same time, many Mexicans who themselves have traveled abroad, to the U.S., to Europe, to Asia—Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz—become themselves towering figures in twentieth-century Latin America. Others still are most universal when they are most “Mexican,” like Juan Rulfo, while José Vasconcelos, who revolutionized education in his country, proposes a “cosmic race,” and Mexico is at its center. This course will look at the literature, visual arts, and film of this period in the context of this international flux. Students who would like to explore Mexico or Latin America beyond the proposed timeline in their conference projects (in English or Spanish) are more than welcome. Taught in English.
Explosive Latin America: Guns, Terror, and Everyday Violence
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Fall
This course will examine how three “explosive” phenomena—the culture of firearms, the culture of terror, and the culture of everyday violence—encapsulate and outwardly express Latin America’s diverse economic and political instabilities for Latin Americans themselves. Course materials in ethnography, history, journalism, and film will help us to analyze why, from one state to another, firearms, terror, and everyday violence coalesce to form a volatile public sphere, but also help people to organize their existence and make sense of a hostile politico-economic environment. This exploration will raise a number of questions. If the state has a monopoly on legitimate violence, then how does the massive armament of nonstate actors change the nature of statecraft? Do legal classifications of armed and dangerous people within the state produce the very things they classify (gangs, guerillas, drug lords, paramilitaries, private security forces, militias, vigilantes, outlaws, human rights violators, and would-be assassins), or vice versa? Instead of concentrating on the capacities of everyday violence and terror to destroy or foreclose one’s life, might we also problematize and critique how, when already present, violence and terror may shape or facilitate possible futures? Does possessing firearms involve being possessed by them? Against a backdrop of these and other difficult questions, our seminar will interrogate the interrelationship between guns, violence, and terror in the broadest possible sense.
Harvest! Land, Labor, and Natural Resources in Latin American History
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Fall
This seminar looks at how natural environments and systems of labor and capital have intersected at different periods in the history of Latin America. How have humans transformed, tamed, devastated—and sometimes been devastated by—their material surroundings in the quest for sustenance, shelter, and eventually profit, “progress,” and power? We will start with Jared Diamond’s materialist, “long-view” explanation of global inequality in Guns, Germs, and Steel; take a critical look at the idea of indigenous Americans’ spiritual oneness with the earth; and proceed through a series of case studies and theoretical essays covering peasant production, plantation slavery, forest product exploitation, export agriculture, and corporate mining and logging. We will use the vehicle of agrarian/environmental history to examine some of the most important themes in Latin American history—violence, slavery, migrations, race, imperialism, gender, human rights, trade, labor, revolution.
Open to sophomores and above.
Madness and Marginality in Latin American Literature
Level: Advanced
Semester: Year
This course will focus on the radical poetics so often present in Latin American literature. We will especially look into those writers where the poetics of extremes often coincides with social, political, or metaphysical revolt and sometimes even ends in literary or existential suicide. Osvaldo Lamborghini, Jacobo Fijman, Alfonsina Storni (Argentina); María Mercedes Carranza (Venezuela); Ana Cristina César (Brazil); Martín Adán, María Emilia Cornejo, Juan Ojeda (Perú); Horacio Quiroga (Uruguay); Reynaldo Arenas, Virgilio Piñera (Cuba); and Rosario Castellanos and Luis Ignacio Helguera (México) will be studied, among others. In this course, students willreinforce and strengthen their process of language acquisition through oral participation in class and essay writing. The ultimate objective will be to consolidate, increase, and refine oral and written expression, while paying special attention to the main aspects of syntax and morphology. We will also search the Internet and do interactive grammar exercises. Students will meet individually with the teacher to further discuss projects and assignments. Weekly meetings with the language assistant will also be part of the course.
Advanced.
Obsession, Thought, and Form in Latin American Poetry: Reading, Writing, and Translating
Level: Advanced
Semester: Year
Poetry, it could be argued, is an epistemology of unlearning. In it, obsession, thought, and form come together to create the impossible, to say what cannot be said, to move away from conventionality and enlarge reality. Its goal is neither to ratify concepts nor to look for certainties, but rather to create a space for doubt and questions, for tolerance and imagination. That is why it is such a subversive art in itself, regardless of the subject matter it deals with. This course will explore these notions and look into the work of the most important poets of Latin America during the twentieth century, while encouraging the students to craft their own poems and to immerse themselves in the practice of translation. Octavio Paz, César Moro, Susana Thénon, José María Eguren, Rosario Castellanos, Jorge Luis Borges, Jorge Eduardo Eielson, Ana Cristina César, César Vallejo, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Vicente Huidobro, among others, will be studied. Special attention will be paid to reading and revision work according to individual needs.
For students seriously interested in reading, writing, and translating poetry who have completed the three levels of Spanish language or the equivalent and are willing to take imaginative risks and give attentive responses to the work of others.
Race in a Global Context
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
This course is a comparative inquiry into the mechanisms of racial domination. First, we will review major theoretical approaches to the study of race. What is the difference between race and ethnicity? How have concepts of race changed over time? Are we seeing a return to biological frameworks of race through advancements in genetic technologies? Next, we will analyze the making and unmaking of race and systems of racial classification that divide and rank social groups. How is race (un)made? What forms of racial categorization can be found across different societies? Finally, we will examine various systems of racial classification across space and time in order to investigate how these are inscribed and reproduced through institutional forms of racial division and domination—namely, prejudice, discrimination, segregation, ghettoization, and exclusionary violence. What is the difference between prejudice and discrimination? Is segregation the same as ghettoization? What determines which groups will be segregated, ghettoized, expelled, or exterminated? By the end of the course, students will have learned to critically interrogate the commonly used concept of “racism” and acquired more useful analytical tools for understanding race as a major organizing principle in social life in the United States through a comparison with other international contexts. Readings will be based on sociological, anthropological, and historical studies of race relations in the United States, Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Western Europe.
Stateless Peoples in Latin America
Level: Advanced
Semester: Spring
Do stateless people exist? Can we imagine society without the state? How might “statelessness” be represented as such? If states legitimize violence, should anthropologists join forces with those (such as the advocates of political anarchism) who work to challenge state authority and disrupt its mechanisms of control and surveillance? These questions, and others like them, are neither idealistic nor essentially utopian in character; they are basic points of inquiry that cultural anthropologists, time and again, have returned to in the process of ethnographic research at the limits and/or margins of state power. In this course, we review anthropologists’ disciplinary legacy of close engagement with stateless peoples, and we systematically analyze the most predominant theories and experiences of “statelessness” from the nineteenth century to the present. The course will focus primarily on Latin American peoples and practices, but also compare Latin American experiences with other world regions, as we survey the “statelessness” of political refugees, socially abandoned individuals, informal labor markets, the Church, NGOs, secret societies, paramilitaries, anti-state activists, and indigenous peoples.
The Caribbean and the Atlantic World
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Year
The Caribbean is Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, Puerto Rico—and it is also Venezuela, eighteenth-century New Orleans, the coastal areas of Central America settled by runaway shipwrecked slaves, and south Florida. The Caribbean speaks Spanish, English, Creole, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Papamiento, and Miskitu, It is an area of tremendous diversity but linked by common experiences of African slavery, colonial domination, underdevelopment, nationalism, and revolution. This course examines the history and culture of the Caribbean, from 1492 to the present, with special emphasis on its place in the world: a source of unprecedented wealth built by the labor of enslaved Africans; a hot spot of international competition, piracy, and war; a crossroads of goods, ideas, and people; and in the twentieth century, a region struggling to be more than an "American lake." We will pay particular attention to Haiti and Cuba, whose democratic and socialist revolutions had an impact in the Americas as powerful as the other, better-known "great revolutions" of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. In our study of the ways in which the Caribbean has been connected to other parts of the Atlantic World, we will use monographs that represent a variety of different historical methodologies and emphases (social, economic, cultural, Atlantic, environmental, and gender history), as well as primary sources.
Open to sophomores and above.