Topics in linguistics of Spanish America and Spain.

Course Description: This seminar addresses melodrama aesthetics in Latin America through the study of literature, cinema, music, and television. For being the most popular art expression, melodrama has been an effective instrument for the dissemination of political ideas and the construction of subjectivities based on gender, racial, and class inequalities. Theoretically, this seminar will discuss concepts on national identity related to sentimental narratives; affects and emotions theories to understand the role of feelings in the definition of daily life power relations; gender and queer categories to understand the melodramatic implications of machismo, misogyny, and homophobia, as well as the processes of resignification, appropriation, and uses of melodrama for deconstructing patriarchal values.  The main topics to be studied are: a) the sentimental novel as foundational narrative of the nation in nineteenth century; b) classical cinema and the pedagogy of machismo; c) melodrama and the technologies of gender; d) queer deconstruction of melodrama; and d) violent imagination in contemporary melodrama.

Grade criteria:

Oral presentations                                                      20%

Class participation                                                      20%

Annotated bibliography                                               20 %

First draft of term paper                                             10%

Term paper                                                                30%

Preliminary bibliography:

Benavides, Hugo.  Drugs, Thugs and Divas. Telenovelas and Narcodramas in Latin America.  Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2008.

Bonfil, Carlos.  Al filo del abismo: Roberto Gavaldón y el melodrama negro.  México: Secretaría de Cultura, 2016.

Cvetkovich, Ann.  An Archive of Feelings. Trauma, sexuality, and Lesbian Public Culture.  Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

Desilet, Gregory E. Our Faith in Evil: Melodrama and the Effects of Entertainment Violence.  Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006.

Domínguez Rivalcaba, Héctor.  De la sensualidad a la violencia de género: modernidad y nación en las representaciones mexicanas de las masculinidades.  México : Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, 2013.

Fiol-Matta, Licia.  The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music.  Durham: Duke, 2017.

Franco Ramos, Jorge.  Melodrama. Bogotá: Planeta, 2006.

Gerassi-Navarro, Nina.  Pirate Novels: Fictions of Nation Building in Spanish America.  Durham: Dike University Press, 1999.

Lemebel, Pedro.  De perlas y cicatrices. Crónicas radiales.  Santiago: LOM, 1996.

Mariño Solano, Germán.  Análisis y elaboración de fotonovelas: una aproximación desde los cuentos de hadas y el melodrama. Bogotá: Enda América Latina, 1990.

Monsiváis, Carlos, Carlos Bonfil.  A través del espejo: el cine mexicano y su público.  México: Ediciones El Milagro-Instituto Mexicano de Ciunematografía, 1994.

Muñiz, Elsa. Cuerpo, representación y poder: México en los albores de la reconstrucción nacional 1920-1934. México: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2002.

Muñoz, José.  Disidentifications. Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics.  Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota, 1999.

Oroz, Silvia.  Melodrama: el cine de lágrimas de América Latina.México: UNAM, 1995.

Quiroz, Gustavo. Hacia una teoría de la significación; el caso del melodrama.  México: UNAM, 1979.

Sadlier, Darlene J.  Latin American Melodrama: Passion, Pathos and Entertainment. Urbana: University of Illinois, 2009.

Sommer, Doris.  Fpundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley: University of California, 1991.

Zapata, Luis.  Melodrama. México: Enjambre, 1983.

This is a new seminar. 

Course Description:

Music and sound have played an especially key cultural, political and social role in Latin America. In the 19th century and early 20th centuries, vernacular musical idioms emerged that would form the backbone of identity projects through the hemisphere, starting with vanguard movements of the 1920s.  The emergence of urban mass media in the first half of the 20th century led to what Michael Denning has called an explosion of decolonizing "audiopolitics." In the early sound era of the 1930s and 1940s, film industries in Mexico, Argentina and Brazil proved instrumental in promoting nationalist-populist platforms to reinforce--and sometimes parody and criticize--what Ana M. López has called "pedagogical" narratives about race, gender and social class. In the 1960s and 1970s, a new generation of writers and filmmakers would place music at the service of revolutionary agendas sometimes at odds with the very institutions (commercial radio, television) through which vernacular music had long thrived. In the globalized, neoliberal era of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, music and sound have served diverse functions, yet their centrality to print and media cultures and society-at-large remains.

In this comparativist, interdiscipinary graduate seminar, students will analyze hemispheric cultural production that makes the politics of national soundscapes a central thematic focus: from 1920s negristamelopoetics and musical melodramas of the 1940s and 1950s, the jazz writing of Julio Cortázar to late 20th and early 21st century reconfigurations of urban aurality. Focusing on the transnational, intra-hemispheric dimensions of audiopolitics, we will draw from a diverse array of theoretical perspectives, from music, sound, and media studies to scholarship on transnationalism, critical hemispherism, and global citizenship.  

Grades will be based on participation, two presentations, and one final research paper (20-25 pages).

Primary readings/viewings (tentative):

Machado de Assis, "Um homem célebre" (1883)

Nicolás Guillén, Motivo de son(1930)

Mário de Andrade, selected works

Alejo Carpentier, selected works

El tango en Broadway(Louis Gasnier, 1934)

Salón México(Emilio Fernández, 1949)

Orfeu Negro(M. Camus, 1959)

Julio Cortázar, Rayuela(selections; 1963)

Nosotros la música(Rogelio París, 1964)

Andrés Caicedo, Que viva la música(1977)

Buscando a Chano Pozo(Rebeca Chávez, 1987)

Caetano Veloso, Verdade Tropical(1997)

Buena Vista Social Club(dir. Wim Wenders, 1999)

Chico y Rita(dir. Fernando Trueba & Javier Mariscal, 2010)

O Som ao Redor(Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2012)

Theoretical/critical readings (tentative):

Jacques Attali, Noise

Josh Kun, Audiotopia

Michael Denning, Audiopolitics

Ana María Ochoa, Aurality

Michael Chion, Audio-Vision

Simon Frith, Performing Rites

Lisa Shaw, Brazilian National Cinema

Ana M. López, selected essays about cinema and music

Robin Moore, Music and Revolution

Jason Borge, Strange Riffs

Dylon Robbins, Audible Geographies in Latin America