Latin American Studies

This course examines ideas, concepts, traditions, and authors that shaped critical thinking in Latin America during the twentieth century, in close relation to the socio-political and economic processes of the region.

This course provides a critical approach to the contemporary debate between three sub- disciplines dedicated to the study of the intellectual production of Latin America: the history of ideas, intellectual history, and decolonial studies. This course identifies, analyzes, and discusses the origins, theoretical-methodological foundations, discrepancies, and challenges of these three currents with a view to glimpsing possible routes for their own research projects.

This course studies the evolution of the population composition in Latin America and the Caribbean in recent decades, reflecting on the links between said demographic dynamics and some of the main economic, political, cultural and social transformations known in the region. This course takes a theoretical and methodological approach, considering the dependence between the size, structure and distribution of a population in interaction with socio-spatial transformations. It discusses demographic transition, aging, young people, the countryside-city relationship, urbanization, employment, territorial mobility, etc.

This course provides theoretical and methodological tools to approach, analyze, and question research from a gender perspective. It examines basic concepts of gender 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.