LALS 387 - Latin American Seminar

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2016/17a: Indigenous Philosophy in Andean Textualities. It is not by chance that certain Andean literature leads us to other cultural expressions, for instance, to dances and myths. The poetics of these performances and narratives are part of the structure of many literary texts in the region. In other words, they can be understood as the intertextuality-the inclusion of one text into another - of those texts. In the case of the Andes, we should extend this definition to include any form of performance, oral narrative, or even an historical event that is re-told by the poetics of a literary text. This course is focused on art works of Peru and Boliva that contain this kind of interetextuality.  In order to explore these works profoundly we wil also become familiar with fundamental aspects of Andean indigenous philosophy. Materials for this course include colonial and contemporary literature, narratives, poetry, plays, theory, and film. We study the connections among these materials in order to find what it is that these textualities are moving or provoking in the Andews. Ximena Postigo-Guzmán.

Topic for 2016/17b: Science Fiction, Horror, and the Occult in Latin America.  This seminar examines the unique origins and evolution of the literature and film of science fiction, horror, and the occult in Latin America. The course focuses on the culturally heterogenous and politically charged context of notions of nature, futurity, progress, dystopia, desire, the uncanny, anxiety, the repressed and the unknown that underlie these interrelated genres in Latin America.  Michael Aronna.

Topic for 2016/17b: New Argentine Cinema. The seminar follows the appearance and development of the Argentine New Wave, from the mid-1990s to the present. These films have initiated a new direction in Argentine and Latin American film, as they try to find new narrative forms that symbolically articulate and transform the radical crises-cultural, national and economic-that neoliberalism and its aftermath brought to the Argentine landscape. In the process, new voices, ethnic communities, sexualities and social sensibilities emerge, questioning established ways of thinking and looking at the nation and its uneasy fragments. The emerging result has been a boom in production that publics and film festivals worldwide have recognized through accolade, prizes, worldwide distribution and critical praise. Films by auteurs such as Adrián Caetano, Martín Rejtman, Pablo Trapero, Lucrecia Martel will be discussed, bearing on themes such as the circulation of bodies and labor, nation, migration and globalization, memory and subjectivity, the eye vs. the gaze, the spheres and politics of social space, and the political unconscious of melodrama and allegory within the context of subalternity and the Third World. Mario Cesareo.

Prerequisite(s): Prerequiste: HISP 216  and one course above 216.

One 2-hour period.