LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN STUDIES PROGRAM

Winter 2024

Winter 2024 COURSE SCHEDULE

Course Descriptions

LATIN_AM 391-0-1: Between the Middle East and the Americas: Diaspora and Transnational Identities

Since the mid-1800s, migrants from Bilad al-Sham (modern-day Levantine region of the Middle East) have traveled to the Americas and settled in towns and cities from Canada to Argentina. Today, this diasporic community—the modern mahjar—has unique local identities while maintaining cultural, political, and economic links to distant homelands. In this course, students will engage with historical and ethnographic accounts of contemporary Middle East diasporas, discussing similarities and differences within the overlapping transnational networks. Students will read about Palestinians in Santiago, Chile; Iraqis in Dearborn, Michigan; Lebanese in Tijuana, Mexico; and much more. From these accounts, the course will extrapolate lessons about intercultural engagement, global migration, and diasporic connectivity and cover topics including culture (food & music), religion, politics, gender, and more. 

LATIN_AM 391-0-2: Indigenous Rebellion through Literature

From the early representations of land as gendered in the chronicles of Christopher Columbus, to the gender crossings of a trans nun who became a conquistador in Peru, this course will consider the central role gender played in the colonization attempts of Latin America through the crónica or chronicle genre. We will also explore important African, Indigenous and Mestiza/o perspectives through archival material, images, codices, and other primary source material. Emphasis will be placed on the shifting terrain of defining the gender binary and its relation to race and class in the emergent concept of "América." A reading knowledge of Spanish is recommended for this course, but not required. This course will be taught in English.

HISTORY 260-2-20: History of Modern Latin America

Aspects of the development of Latin America's socioeconomic, political, cultural, and religious institutions and practices. After independence and through the modern period, c. 1821 to the present.

HISTORY 370-0-20: Music and Nation in Latin America

This course takes students along a sonorous trip through Latin America and the Caribbean studying specific cases to comprehend why popular music has been crucial in the formation of nations and states. The history of son in Cuba, samba in Brazil, tango in Argentina, corrido in Mexico, merengue in Dominican Republic, among others, help students understand how certain sounds became sonorous emblems of modern nations. These histories allow students to examine how popular music has mediated the tensions that resulted from processes of development and urbanization; and they illustrate how racial, gender, and class hierarchies have been represented in musical styles, shaping the contours of national identities and cultures. We will also navigate the circuits in which certain sounds, such canción protesta, cumbia, salsa, rock, and reggaetón, crossed geographic boundaries and evolved into transnational genres that express the collective experience of revolution, rebellion, exile, and migration. We address all these cases reading history, anthropology, sociology, journalism, and ethnomusicology. We will also listen, watch, and analyze critically songs, lyrics, music videos, movies, and documentary films.

PORT 210-0-2/COMP_LIT 202-2: Icons, Legends, and Myths in Brazil

Representations in graphic materials, documentaries, film, theater, folklore, narrative fiction, and popular music of historical, literary, and popular figures in the national imagination. Incudes English or Portuguese discussion sections. Prerequisite for Portuguese discussion section: PORT 201-0, PORT 202-0, or sufficient score on placement exam. Prerequisite for English discussion section: none. 

LATINO 391-0-1: Curandera Histories, Counter-Stories, & Knowledge

To guide learning and pedagogical practice, we employ the concept "historian as curandera [healer]." Coined by scholar Aurora Levins-Morales, the curandera lens challenges us to engage critical inquiries when exploring untold or unrepresented Latinx hi/stories and social mo(ve)ments. How does positionality affect what one sees/understands? What constitutes evidence? How do historical narratives transform when we center the marginalized? How do we make our work digestible and accessible? By adopting a curandera lens, students will undertake independent research to create digital snapshots of transformative, healing hi/stories.

JOUR 305-0-26: Visual Reporting in Bogota

This Medill JOURneys course offers students a unique opportunity to immerse themselves for one week in Bogota, a city rich in colorful history and culture that is currently struggling with a migrant crisis. In this course, we will develop skills in global journalism by creating visual stories on the culture, arts, issues, food and people of Bogota. Using a few different examples as a guide. Those examples include: Vox on migrants https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NU0RqwweuWY Plaza de Mercado de Paloquemao - The market synthesizes the variety and color of Colombia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oq7qbXcmba0&t=7s All the cuisines of Colombia converge in Bogotá -https://www.netflix.com/co/title/81249660) This class will stress engaged and evocative writing, the finer points of shooting and editing and the deeply moving nature of people-centered stories. Students will spend the weeks prior to the Spring Break trip preparing for work on the ground. This will involve readings and viewings, classroom discussions, engagement with professionals, exercises with the camera and other assignments designed to help you prepare to create rich, visual stories in Bogota. Each student will choose a topic/story to work on in Bogota and will find a correlating topic/story to cover here in Evanston or Chicago to do in the weeks prior to the trip. This will allow feedback and growth to incorporate in our work in Colombia. Reporting, shooting and producing stories will be the bulk of the Bogota trip. When we return, you'll edit and revise your work each week to produce your final product and make sure it's work you are proud of.

RTVF 351-0-23: Cinema of the Caribbean & Indian Ocean

How does Caribbean and Indian Ocean cinema differentiate itself from Hollywood's imagined island culture? How do histories of colonization, slavery, and migration shape the cinema of these aquatic regions? What is "national cinema" in the era of transnational productions? Build on your historical and geographical comprehension of "national cinema" through a study of island films. The course promotes interdisciplinary methods to query two strands of thought: 1) the relevance and impact of Caribbean and Indian Ocean films to cinematic history, and 2) the category of "national cinema." We will explore the formal, stylistic, and production styles that represent each island and its relation to major film industries. In addition to analyzing the filmic elements, the course enhances your scope of cinema by engaging with topics such as minor and independent cinema production; diasporic film cultures; Indigeneity; environmental degradation; and tourism and leisure. Our Caribbean focus may include films from Cuba, Martinique, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago. We may incorporate films from Mauritius, Reunion Island, Seychelles, and Madagascar in the context of the Indian Ocean.

PORT 303-0-1: Brazil's Historical and Artistic Perspectives

Students will deepen their knowledge of the Portuguese language through the study of Brazil’s History and Art. By reading from texts, analyzing and discussing videos, documentaries and Artwork depicting Brazil’s historical and socio-cultural aspects, students will have an overall idea about the country’s evolution from pre-colonial times to nowadays’ perspectives. Prerequisite: PORT 201-0, PORT 202-0 or Dept. Placement.

SPAN 261-0-1, 2, 3: Literature in Latin America Since 1888

This course provides an overview of some of the major trends in Latin American literatures since 1888, while at the same time offering opportunities to improve students’ oral and written Spanish.  The course will emphasize various literary styles and ideological constructions that, in different ways, reflect the complexity of Latin American writing.  While introducing students to the social and historical context in which the works were written, the course will focus on the following issues: the cultural and political dimensions of literature; the representation of class, gender, and race; the formative impact of nationalism and internationalism; and the concern for finding autochthonous modes of expression. Prerequisite (may be taken concurrently): SPANISH 200-0 or 204-0.

SPAN 345-0-1: Reading the "Boom"

This course will focus on the Latin American “Boom”--the literary, cultural, and commercial phenomenon of the 1960s and 1970s that internationalized Latin American literature. The Boom inaugurated what some critics called a “revolutionary writing” that not only challenged literary practices from the first half of the 20th century, but also generated a parallel boom of critical writing about Latin American literature and writers. Through critical essays, documentary films, and autobiographical accounts, we will consider the historical, political, literary, and personal factors that contributed to the Boom phenomenon, the ways in which it was viewed and represented at the time and in subsequent decades, and its role within Latin American literary and cultural history. Primary materials will include Carlos Fuentes’s La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962) and Manuel Puig’s Boquitas pintadas (1969), which represent different phases of the Boom and different trends in the “new” narrative, and José Donoso’s Historia personal del boom (1972; 1983), which presents a Boom author’s behind-the-scenes version of literary events and personal relationships during the 1960s-1970s.Secondary materials will include essays by other Boom writers, filmed interviews with authors, and scholarly articles. Prerequisite: 1 course out of SPANISH 250-0, 251-0, 260-0, or 261-0. Note: this course is taught in Spanish.

GNDR_ST 490-0-23/SPANPORT 450-0-2: Gender in Colonial Spanish America

From the early representations of land as gendered in the chronicles of Christopher Columbus, to the gender crossings of a trans nun who became a conquistador in Peru, this course will consider the central role gender played in the colonization attempts of Latin America through the crónica or chronicle genre. We will also explore important African, Indigenous and Mestiza/o perspectives through archival material, images, codices, and other primary source material. Emphasis will be placed on the shifting terrain of defining the gender binary and its relation to race and class in the emergent concept of “América.” A reading knowledge of Spanish is recommended for this course, but not required. This course will be taught in English.

SPANPORT 450-0-1: Amerindian Heterochronies in Contemporary Latin American Cultures

Contemporary Latin American cultural practices have been profoundly permeated by Amerindian imaginaries, wisdom, and ways of knowing and doing. These contemporary Amerindian practices and the presence of ancestral Amerindian knowledge in other contemporary Latin American practices interrupt the linearity of a conception of culture, challenge totalizing universals, dispute systems of meaning, and compel us to rethink what we understand today as contemporary Latin American cultures. This course seeks to interrogate the knots of these Amerindian practices and knowledges in and with contemporary Latin American culture. It will analyze practices produced by artists who perceive themselves as Amerindian and how Amerindian practices and knowledge, beyond their authors and producers, appear as a vector of rebellious forces and knots of resistance.

SPANPORT 480-0-1: Reading the 19th Century Brazilian Novel with Machado de Assis

In this course we will read 19th century, mostly canonical novels from Brazil, alongside short stories by the afro-descendent writer Machado de Assis (1839-1908), considered by many to be the most important author in the entire history of Brazilian literature. Each week we will read one novel and two or three of his short stories dealing with the same themes, such as: slavery, indigeneity, race and racial mixture, fugitivity, education and the bildungsroman, queer families, gender, sexuality, and adultery. The purpose of the course is threefold: first, to offer an in-depth survey of the foundational writings and authors of Brazilian literature; second, to understand, from a comparative approach, how these writers approached some of the most pressing issues of 19th-century; third, to imagine how Machado de Assis read and evaluated the novels produced at the time. Because we want to read as much fiction as we can, the class discussions will not require any secondary readings, although a list of relevant theory and criticism will be provided and may be utilized in the oral presentation, exam or research paper. All readings will be available in Portuguese and English translations, and almost all in Spanish translations, and almost all will be available on reserve in the Northwestern library.