This course investigates how people of African descent in the Americas have forged social, political, and cultural ties across geopolitical and linguistic boundaries. We will interrogate the transnational dialogue between African Americans and Afro-Latin Americans using case studies from Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. We will explore how Black activists have partnered to challenge racism and economic inequality, while also considering why efforts to mobilize Afro-descendants across the Americas have often been undermined by mutual misunderstandings.

This course explores the central role of food in everyday life in US and global contexts. Using a comparative global perspective, we will address key questions about histories of food production and consumption, the ways in which food production and distribution differentially affect the lives of those working in the food industry and those consuming food. We will think through how global shifts in food production and distribution impact human lives on national, local, and familial levels.

The course focuses on the social forces that shape design thinking. Its objective is to introduce architectural and urban design issues to build design and critical thinking skills from a multidisciplinary perspective. The studio is team-taught from faculty across disciplines to expose students to the multiple forces within which design operates.

From secret laboratories to monumental infrastructures and the many landscapes of war, energy, and waste in between, nuclear power is at the core of a vast and radically understudied array of 20th c. architectures. Central to the most iconic architectural images of the post-war era while also rendered invisible in apparently unseen wastelands, atomic weapons, nuclear reactors, and atmospheric fallout eventually attracted intense architectural attention. Drawing on multiple literatures, the seminar explores how the nuclear penetrated beyond warscapes to enter even the private spaces of the domestic realm and the human body.

What is the 'place' of fiction? How are senses of place configured in literary language and philosophical concepts? How does the question about real and fictional space become a problem within the very practice of writing? This course will approach these questions as they appear in different literary and critical texts throughout the modern and contemporary periods. Some of the topics to be discussed include: the poetics of imaginary spaces, architectural diagrams, dystopias, and the relations between metafiction, writing, and non-place.

This course studies contemporary Latin American & Caribbean literature and visual arts. Looking at the changing relationships between aesthetics and politics, we will analyze how textual and visual works respond to different forms of violence and express other forms of imagining relations among bodies, communities, and territories. Texts will be available in the original & translation. Some classes will take place at the Art Museum study room at Firestone

The readings and discussions will consider how the literature and arts of Haiti affirm, contest, and bear witness to historical narratives concerning the world's first black republic. The course will sample an array of historical accounts, novels, Afro-Caribbean religion (Vodun), plays, music, film, and visual arts of this unique postcolonial nation.

Through the lens of Latin America, this course explains how colonization worked in Early Modernity and what were its consequences. We study how the Aztec and Inca empires subdued other peoples before Columbus, and how Muslim Iberia fell to the Christians. Then, we learn about European conquests and the economic, political, social and cultural trajectory of the continent over more than 300 years, shaped by a deepening connection to an evolving Atlantic capitalist system, by Indigenous and slave resistance, adaptation, and racial mixing, and by insurrectionary movements. This is a comprehensive view of how Latin America became what it is now.

History 306 studies all Latinos in the US, from those who have (im)migrated from across Latin America and the Caribbean to those who lived in what became US lands. The course covers the historical origins of debates over land ownership, the border, assimilation expectations, discrimination, immigration regulation, intergroup differences, civil rights activism, and labor disputes. History 306 looks transnationally at Latin America's history by exploring shifts in US public opinion and domestic policies. By the end of the course, students will have a greater understanding and appreciation of how Latinos became an identifiable group in the US.

This course examines the history of modern Brazil from the late colonial period to the present. Lectures, readings, and discussions challenge prevailing narratives about modernity to highlight instead the role played by indigenous and African descendants in shaping Brazilian society. Topics include the meanings of political citizenship; slavery and abolition; race relations; indigenous rights; uneven economic development and Brazil's experiences with authoritarianism and globalization.

This course proposes a counter-narrative of the myths and fantasies that have been created about the Caribbean and of the historical and cultural realities surrounding them. Through a close reading of literary, artistic, critical, and historical texts we will examine race, ethnic, and gender identity constructions; the rise of the plantation economy; and the emergence of modern nations. The relationship between coloniality and the emergence of diasporic Caribbean voices of dissidence will be a guiding tone for our conversations throughout the semester as we unpack the links between colonialism and diaspora in the Caribbean.

As carceral systems expand across the Americas, this course articulates two feminist traditions for the abolition of the prison-industrial complex in the U.S. and against punitive systems in Latin America to explore how communities theorize and organize under carceral systems, envisioning and rehearsing diverse forms of justice. Building on abolitionist, feminist, and anthropological literature in dialogue with grassroots organizers, this course introduces students to theories on the carceral state, interrelated forms of violence, and organizing for justice under carceral states, including the U.S., but with a special focus on Latin America.

How can we grasp and conceptualize the experience of being displaced from home, stranded in a refugee camp, or living undocumented in a foreign country? This interdisciplinary course explores these questions by engaging with literature, cultural and political theory, international law, film, and art on forced displacement by twentieth-century and contemporary Latin American authors and artists. The goal is to provide students with a critical vocabulary and historical perspective to analyze the cultural, ethical, and political dimensions of today's global migratory and refugee crises.

During our course, we will analyze in a philosophical perspective the role that motherhood and archives have played in confronting the oblivion and injustice caused by enforced disappearance in Mexico. Our critical analysis will involve the close examination of three key elements: history, the archive, and justice. Some of the thinkers and writers who will allow us to address these elements are: Giorgio Agamben, Sayak Valencia, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Achille Mbembe, Susana Draper, Miranda Fricker, Sara Uribe, among others.

This course will analyze the role of cinema in the construction (and deconstruction) of national and transnational identities and discourses in the Portuguese-speaking world. We will examine recurring cultural topics in a wide variety of films from Brazil, Portugal, and Lusophone Africa and Asia, situating works within their socio-historical contexts and tracing the development of national cinemas and their interaction with global aesthetics and trends. Through these cinematographic productions we will illuminate complex relationships between Portuguese-speaking societies and analyze significant cross-cultural differences and similarities.

The enslavement and colonization of Africans disarticulated African and Afro-Diasporic historical time and social memory, fragmented by the dispersion and oppression of their/our bodies, cultures, and territories. Lately, memory has reclaimed a central space in politics, particularly concerning minorities, and cinema has become a privileged medium of/for memory. We explore film genres, topics, and aesthetics seen in African and Afro-Brazilian cinemas to recreate pasts, presents, and futures, exploring different forms of memory, from traditional archives (documents, pictures) to memory as an embodied, practiced, and inscribed presence.

This course explores the vast linguistic diversity of the Americas: native languages, pidgins, creoles, mixed languages, and other languages in North, Central, and South America, including the Caribbean. We will examine historical and current issues of multilingualism to understand the relationship between language, identity, and social mobility. We will discuss how languages played a central role in colonization and nation-building processes, and how policies contribute to language loss and reclamation. Students will work with members of the Munsee Delaware Nation to develop community relationships and collaborate in a small project.

This seminar grapples with the question of authorship and meaning in the literature of Jorge Luis Borges, the legendary Argentine writer whose convoluted fictions continue puzzling readers. Borges is a foundational figure. Gabriel García Márquez and Paul Auster, and philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, are all indebted to Borges. Using different perspectives, from philosophy and aesthetics to politics and cultural analysis, we will study Borges's thematic and formal obsessions: time and memory; labyrinths; reading as a form of writing; and the universality of Argentine local traditions such as tango and gaucho culture.

How are ideas of belonging to the body politic defined in Latin America, the Caribbean, and within Spanish-speaking communities in the US? What are créole identities? Who is "Latin American," "(Afro-)Latinx," "Boricua," "Chino," "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 analyzing literary, historical, visual and sound productions across centuries to present time.

This seminar explores the intersections between Modern architecture and literature in three Latin American cities: Havana, Mexico City, Bogota. How were built environments inhabited and written by novelists and poets? How did architects respond to literary and cultural debates? Nicolas Arroyo, Mario Pani, Rogelio Salmona contributed to constructing a specific Latin American modernity, in dialogue with authors Alejo Carpentier, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Theoretical discussions include critical regionalism, gender and architecture, and environmental context.

This course will study the system of international protection, who is understood to qualify and why, how the system has changed over time, and what these developments mean for a broader understanding of human rights across borders. We will also take a critical look at asylum, examine ideas of deservingness and innocence and their intersection with categories of race, class, and gender, and question what it means for certain people to be constructed as victims and others to be seen as not eligible for protection. This class will also collaborate with a New York organization to work directly on ongoing asylum claims.