Latin American Studies

This course discusses violence, memory and exile in Latin America through the lens of literature and literary theory. It especially focuses on exile from Argentina and exiled writers living in Mexico. It aims to understand the relationship between literature, society and history. The class uses theoretical tools to analyze different literature from Latin America and aims to think about violence memory and exile in Latin America. The course includes texts and novels from Latin American writers, accompanied by Latin American movies as well as theoretical texts that serve to provide context for the class. Beyond the texts, the class aims to use cultural knowledge and understandings to clarify and elaborate the ideas and concepts of memory, exile and violence.

This course offers an in-depth discussion of key topics in the history of Brazilian art and its relation to other cultural spheres such as architecture, literature, and popular music. It examines the trajectory of avant-gardism in Brazil, starting with its consolidation in 1920s debates apropos of notions such as futurism, modernismo and
anthropophagy; its constructivist inflection in the 1950s, with the appearance of Museums of Modern Art and the São Paulo Biennial and provisional cultural alliances with cosmopolitan sectors of an emergent urban bourgeoisie; the growing social and political tensions that marked the resurgence of figuration in the 1960s and the
development of what artist Hélio Oiticica called his “environmental program”; and finally the dispersion of the avant-garde during the harshest years of the military regime and the rise of new experimental tendencies by Brazilian artists who either remained in the country or took exile abroad in the 1970s. The course also discusses the broader background of modernism in Brazil (as opposed to the narrower sphere of the avant-garde) and developments in the fields of architecture (such as the construction of Brasília) and popular music (such as musical Tropicalism) that proved impactful also to visual artists. Throughout the course, students investigate the issue of nationalism x internationalism in the arts, highlighting different strategies of critical assimilation of international tendencies by Brazilian artists and critics.
The course includes not only classroom lectures and discussion seminars, but also occasional visits to museums and architectural landmarks in Rio de Janeiro.

This course intends to study in an interrelated way the development of Latin American Novel and its adaptations into Latin American and international cinema. It comprises, furthermore, perspectives on the reception of publics, the historical conjunctures, the Nation and State discourses, and critical and democratic counter-discourses.

This course covers the topic of food to explore the history of Mexico and its diaspora from the time of the Conquest, with a particular focus on food as national and cultural identity as reflected in cinema and literature. It will also explore how food provides a multifaceted lens through which to examine issues such as food and poverty, food as a transnational site of both community and exclusion, and ecological issues, such as control of natural resources essential to food production and security. Students will examine the topic of food as both a political issue and a source of creative inspiration through our analysis of texts, art, films and television series.

This course explores the evolution of women's work inside and outside of the home; traditional and emerging views relative to women and domestic and/or care work; and current models that include greater State involvement and societal support for domestic and care work as prerequisites for gender equity and more robust democracies in Latin America. Students derive the conceptual tools for their own critical analyses, developing an amplified understanding of the role of care and domestic work in Latin America; the role that women play in the same, and what this classic equation has meant for the region's development trajectories. Likewise, the course introduces existing models and policy alternatives. It is divided into two parts: the first part covers Latin American women's inequality in labor and in society, and the second part considers emerging responses.

This course examines musical phenomena from an anthropological perspective. From this perspective, music is approached as a social practice and symbolic production, as a performance that produces meanings and agency for musicians and listeners. Present in all societies, music tends to be a collective and ritualized activity through which its practitioners - including listeners - reaffirm shared values ​​and a sense of belonging to local, national, and transnational communities or social groups. At the end of the course, students are expected to 1: improve their ability to deal with the experience of musical otherness and, 2: understand the implications of the cultural, social, and political context in defining the different concepts of music and meanings that are collectively attributed to it.