Courses

South America continues to be an object of fascination for travelers from outside the continent, eager to encounter an exotic landscape of rainforests and hidden cities. This course pushes aside this romantic view to explore the true cultural and ecological diversity of a continent with over 15,000 years of human history. We will engage with the archaeology of South America as a dynamic field of discussion and controversy, examining topics such as the initial peopling of the Americas, social complexity in the Amazon, Inca and Spanish imperialism, and questions of decolonizing the discipline.

How are ideas of belonging to the body politic defined in Spain, Latin America, and in Spanish-speaking communities in the United States? Who is "Latin America," Latinx," "Chino," "Argentine," "Guatemalan," "Indian," etc.? Who constructs these terms and why? Who do they include/exclude? Why do we need these identity markers in the first place? Our course will engage these questions by surveying and analyzing literary, historical, and visual productions from the time of the foundation of the Spanish empire to the present time in the Spanish speaking world.

What is colonization? How does it work? What kind of societies does it create? Come find out through the lens of the Latin America. First we study how the Aztec and Inca empires subdued other peoples, and how Muslim Iberia fell to the Christians. Then, we learn about Spanish and Portuguese conquests and how indigenous resistance, adaptation, and racial mixing shaped the continent. You will see gods clash and meld, cities rise and decline, and insurrections fail or win. Silver mines will boom and bust, slaves will toil and rebel; peasants will fight capitalist encroachments. This is a comprehensive view of how Latin America became what it is.

This interdisciplinary course focuses on the city of São Paulo, with its vibrant cultural life, its complex social interactions, and its deep urban history. Through the analysis of literature, film, music, theatre, visual arts, and architecture, students will gain an immersive understanding of Brazil's most populous and diverse city. Topics include: The 1922 Week of Modern Art; cultural anthropology; the creation of the University of São Paulo; social movements; center and periphery.

An exploration of films made in the last fifty years featuring "descents into savagery" and the colonial, alphabetic texts that inspired them. Topics to be discussed, among others: primitivism and progress; coloniality; media and mediation; race and gender; intercultural dialogues; healing practices; community-based performances. Films shown with English subtitles.

This course examines the rapid urbanization of Latin America, focusing especially on the political, economic, environmental, demographic, and cultural/aesthetic dimensions of urbanization processes and their implications. Topics to include: urban resource wars, gentrification and neighborhood change, planetary urbanization, vanguard urbanism, and the politics of aesthetics. Lectures and reading material will explore these issues across such paradigmatic urban places as Rio de Janeiro, Cochabamba, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, and Bogotá.

After Fidel Castro marched into Havana in January 1959, a cultural revolution followed the political one: literature, the arts, architecture, film, and dance sought to break with the past and proposed new, utopian ways of artmaking. This seminar will offer an overview of some of the most important cultural productions of this era, including films, novels, political essays, and architectural works, which ended by the early 1970s with the rise of censorship.

Home to both shocking atrocities and heroic justice movements, Latin America illuminates the range of challenges, successes, tensions, and promises of the human rights project. Students will trace legacies of mass violations, such as those left by authoritarian rule. Students will then engage with contemporary human rights problems in the region, including the "war on drugs"; prison abuse; dissenter's rights; closing civil society space; indigenous land struggles; sexual and reproductive rights; and economic, social and cultural rights in the face of extreme inequality.

The demographic shifts and new processes of cultural circulation associated with global capital and media, have disrupted traditional notions of geographically-bound identities and national cultures as apparatuses of power. At the same time, previously hidden, marginalized, and devalued forms of indigenous and native wisdom have reemerged, precisely to contest the destructive tendencies of Western epistemology. This seminar will therefore focus on the theories and methods of global Indigeneities to examine from their standpoint the dependence of human cognition on the natural environment.

What roles have science and technology played in shaping modern Latin American nations, communities, and environments? This course explores the history of Latin American since independence (1800s-present) through various lenses, including the natural sciences, infrastructure and engineering, and health and medicine. The goal is to use science and technology as a way of exploring state-formation, territoriality, social control and resistance, and environmental relations.

How do we theorize the practices of insurgency and resistance, apostasy and heresy, riots and boycotts? How are they recorded, if at all? Can they write themselves? We explore seminal texts of Colonial Latin America, with a focus on the Andes, to examine how these are both inscribed and erased from the Archive and, in so doing, question the category of the "colonial" itself and the various prefixes associated with it. Primary authors include Las Casas, Francisco de la Cruz (heretic), Vargas Machuca, Guaman Poma de Ayala, Francisco Vásquez, and Lope de Aguirre; theoretical works by Guha, De Certeau, Clover, Marx and Rocker.