Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante

The objective of this seminar is to study both colonizing and decolonizing practices in the realms of literature, the arts and media in the Southern Cone and the Andean regions of “Latin America” (Abiayala), from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Specifically, the seminar focuses on the role of media in the deployment of colonial processes, decolonizing countercurrents, and especially the clashes and entanglements between the two by both criollo and Indigenous agents. Media analyzed will include literary works, photography, comic book magazines, songs, radio, audiovisual media, performance and digital technologies, bringing together and interweaving questions of language and representation, listening practices, sound and visual cultures. The seminar will offer the opportunity to situate and discuss media within systemic structures of power and relations, considering racial, ethnic, gender, linguistic, cultural, political, technological and historical dimensions.  Exploring the broad issues of settler colonial state formations, heteronormative patriarchal oppression, destructive and extractive capitalism, and the local and global environmental crisis, as well as engaging anti-colonial, anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal Indigenous responses will be critical to our seminar discussion. Methodologically and theoretically, course readings will draw from recent literature in sound studies, media theory, decolonizing methodologies, native feminism(s), queer/cuir indigenous studies, critical race approaches and critiques of capitalism through emancipatory lenses, as intersectional ways to discuss material and symbolic practices of colonial/capitalist power relations, decolonizing experiences and Indigenous agency that performatively take place in the realm of literature, the arts and media regimes. 

Note: Conducted in Spanish. Writing assignments in Spanish or English.

This course aims to offer an in-depth view on the multi-layered relations of Indigenous Peoples to the land in the context of late twentieth- and early-twenty first century Abiayala (or what is known today as the Americas). Indigenous struggles for the protection of land, water and territories are a matter of life in times of capitalist, colonial and patriarchal regimes of global and local forms of oppression and destruction. In this course, we will focus on the ways in which native engagements with the environment are grounded in a sense of the land as a territory of multiple lives and relations; and, therefore, they have come in sharp conflict with the contemporary colonizing waves of local, national or transnational; extractivist, destructive or settler; assimilationist, multicultural, exclusionary or genocidal capitalism. We will examine written, visual, musical and audiovisual media through which native subjectivities and collective subjects resurge—either based in their traditional territories or in urban diasporas—as creative cultural and political forces of resistance and agency to vindicate land and life as indigenous matters, against the contemporary colonial/capitalist enterprise of ecological destruction and death. Even though the course will mainly focus on the issue of indigeneity and land politics, critical attention will be also given to questions of migration, race, body politics, gender and sexuality. Supplementary theoretical readings will include authors from Abiayala broadly speaking, including native scholars from the Turtle Island and Oceania, to offer some hemispheric and global perspectives on the topic of the course. 

Bibliography and Sources

I, Rigoberta Menchú. An Indian Woman in Guatemala (testimony, 1984), edited by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray

Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village (non-fiction, 1987)

Voices from Exile: Violence and Survival in Modern Maya History (non-fiction, 1999)\

A Place Called Chiapas (film, 1998) by Nettie Wild

Words of the True Peoples: Anthology of Contemporary Mexican Indigenous Language Writers (2005) edited by Carlos Montemayor and Donald Frischmann

Una Isu, “Mixtec is a Language” and other hiphop songs

Pichka Harawikuna: Five Quechua Poets (poetry, 1998), edited by Julio Noriega

I Am a Defender of the Jungle (video, 2006) by Heriberto Gualinga

UL: Four Mapuche Poets (poetry, 1998), edited by Cecilia Vicuña

The Veil of Berta (film, 2004) by Esteban Larrain

Ko ta mapungey ka/Water is also territory (art installation, 2020) by Sebastián Calfuqueo

Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the NoDAPL Movement (2019), edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon

Of the Earth Healing, a Central Texas-based space led by Marika Alvarado

Critical and theoretical readings

Selections from Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999) by Linda Tuhiwai Smith

“On the Role of Traditional Ecological Knowledge as a Collaborative Concept: A philosophical study” (2013) by Kyle Powys Whyte

Selections Earth Politics: Religion, Decolonization, and Bolivia's Indigenous Intellectuals (2014) by Waskar Ari

“For Abiayala to Live, the Americas Must Die: Toward a Transhemispheric Indigeneity” (2018) by Emil Keme

Selections from Our History is the Future (2019) by Nick Estes

“At Home on the Mountain, Ecological Violence and Fantasies of Terra Nullius on Maunakea’s Summit” (2019) by Hi’ilei Hobart

Grading Policy and Course Requirements

Attendance 15%. Participation 15%.

-No more than 3 absences are accepted during the semester.

-Consistent participation in discussions in classroom and/or in zoom sessions.

-Writing Assignments:

4 brief response papers based on a set of questions provided by the instructor. 2-3 pages. 20%

Two Essays. 25% each, 50% total (to be submitted through e-mail)

These essays will focus on a topic relevant to the analysis of the iconic figures under examination. Students are expected to develop a creative and critical take on specific issues discussed previously in the classroom. Length: 5-8 pages, double space.

What is a popular icon? How do certain historical figures become iconized, that is, converted into images and symbols that have long lives, among millions of people and across generations? How do they embody the traces of political, economic, social, and cultural histories? Or, reversely, how do icons shape public and collective imagination? In this course, we will study and discuss figures that have become “icons of the people” in Argentina and Chile: political leaders such as Eva Perón, Ernesto Che Guevara, and Salvador Allende, and singers and artists such as Carlos Gardel and Violeta Parra will be the focus of the class, as well as the indigenous historical figure of Lautaro, who has been revived as a contemporary emblem by the Mapuche social movement in recent years. All of them have become iconized through photographic images, movies, poems, novels, songs, and political speeches, constituting figures of true cult in both literature and the arts as well as in mass media and popular imagination. They have become iconic referents not only in local and national imaginaries, but also in transnational and global networks of representation and circulation. In this course, rather than analyzing them as “mythical” figures, we will place them in the historical realm in order to examine and discuss the social processes, the political and cultural histories, the gender, ethnic, and racial relations from which they emerge. This course will also bring together approaches and views from disciplines such as literature, music, film, history, and politics, and fields such as cultural studies, media studies, performance, gender and queer politics, critical race theory, and indigenous studies. Likewise, this course will engage the analysis of different technologies of representation, from writing and visual materials to voices and sounds, thus including a variety of genres and media.

Readings and Other Materials To Be Discussed

Tango Bar (1935), a film directed by John Reinhardt and music by Carlos Gardel

Los grandes exitos de Carlos Gardel [sound recording] (1983)

El album de oro de Carlos Gardel [sound recording]  (1981)

Los mejores tangos de Carlos Gardel (1996)

La razón de mi vida : y otros escritos (Evita por ella misma), an autobiography by Eva Perón

Evita (1996), a Hollywood film by director Alan Parker

Evita (1997), a novel by Tomás Eloy Martinez

Violeta se fue a los cielos (2011), a film directed by Andrés Wood

Canciones de Violeta Parra [sound recording]

Décimas: autobiografía en verso by Violeta Parra

“Violeta Parra,” a poem by Nicanor Parra

 Diario del Che en Bolivia (1968), a diary by Ernesto Che Guevara

Diarios de motocicleta (2004), a film directed Walter Salles

Songs on Che Guevara: “Hasta siempre, comandante” by Carlos Puebla, “Si el poeta eres tú” by Pablo Milanés, “El aparecido” by Víctor Jara. “Nada más!” by Atahualpa Yupanqui, “Elegía al Che Guevara” by Quilapayun, and “América, te hablo de Ernesto” by Silvio Rodríguez

Poems on Che Guevara: “Tristeza en la muerte de un héroe” by Pablo Neruda,  “Soldadito boliviano” by Nicolás Guillén, “Yo tuve un hermano” by Julio Cortázar, “Elegía al Che” by Joan Brossa, “Credo del Che” by Roque Dalton and “Pensamientos” by Juan Gelman

Salvador Allende (2004), a film by Patricio Guzmán

Discursos Salvador Allende (2008)

"Mi pueblo ha sido el más traicionado de este tiempo" (1973) by Pablo Neruda

“Chile, el golpe y los gringos” (2003) by Gabriel García Márquez

“Poema 48,” a poem about Allende by Gonzalo Millán

 Excerpt from La Araucana (1569-1589) by Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga

Songs on Lautaro: “Lautaro y Valdivia” by Quilapayun; “Lautaro en el viento” by Quilapayun

Poems on Lautaro: “Zolkiñmangey ñi furi”/“Le sacaron la piel” and “Lauxaro ñi puji”/”El espíritu de Lautaro” by Mapuche poet Leonel Lienlaf; “Mapurbe” and “Lautaro, by Mapuche poet David Añiñir

This course will discuss literary and artistic works that engage in questions of environmental care and justice in the context of twentieth- and twentieth-first century Latin America. Environmental issues have been critical through the disparate processes of "modernization" that have shaped Latin American societies, in the early twentieth-century scenarios of primary agro-export economies, the import-substituting industrialization model of the post-1930s, as well as in the contemporary setting of extractive and outward-oriented market societies. Literatures and the arts have actively engaged in these processes, offering not only critiques but alternative currents in regard to the relationships to human and non-human animal lives and the natural, material and symbolic environments.

In this course, we will examine works of literature, film, music and sound arts, visual and audiovisual arts in conjunction with environmental questions and the ways they interweave with the continuity of colonial regimes of oppression and dispossession; imperialist histories; and the "development” crisis of global capitalism; social justice, community activism and environmental movements; the responses of Indigenous, Afro, and local communities; racial, ethnic, cultural and territorial issues; and the technological and cultural logics underlying the long "modernizing" era of Latin America.

Course Title: Colonialism(s), Decolonization, and Indigenous Responses

Description: This seminar aims to offer a critical and historical review of the influential currents of thought on colonialism and its multiple forms and manifestations inAbya Yala—a Kuna language term referring to the continent that we know today as “the Americas.” The course will mainly focus on critical elaborations on colonial experiences, regimes, and practices by Indigenous scholars, activist, and movements. Furthermore, it will give critical attention to the ways in which these theorizations envision anti-colonial politics, decolonization movements, and Indigenous politics and agency in the cultural, aesthetic, epistemic, ontological, methodological, and historical terrains. The readings and discussions will geographically and historically empasize anti-colonial and decolonizing thought rooted in the southern part of the Abya Yala continent—or what has been named “Latin America” in nation-states narratives. The seminar will also include influential authors and works from Native North America (Turtle Island) and other regions of the world. Works by some influential non-Indigenous thinkers will be incorporated into the readings and discussions. Film, literature, and art will all be included. This seminar will be conducted in Spanish.

Grading Policy: This course will use the plus/minus grading scale for each of the assignments as well as for the final grade. The final grade will be determined by the following requirements:

Attendance and participation in class discussions- 25%

Research Paper (RP)- 75%: an aprox.15-page research paper, reflecting the student’s research interests in regard to territorial and spatial issues. We will not leave this research paper for the end of the semester but rather we will start working on it by the middle of the semester in order to set up a process of outlining, drafting, editing, and critical and self-critical revision around the task of writing a research paper.  The instructor will closely follow this process with planned meetings with each member of the seminar. 

Our RP agenda and more specific grade percentages are: 

RP proposal: 15%.  RP Preliminary draft: 20 %. RP Final draft: 40%.

 Requirements: Graduate students with knowledge of Spanish are automatically admitted into the seminar.  Students from the PhD in Spanish are required to write in Spanish; students from other graduate programs can write in English, Spanish, or Portuguese.

Primary Readings

Selections fromSiete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana(1928) by José Carlos Mariátegui

Los ríos profundos(1958) by José María Arguedas

“El colonialismo interno” from Sociología de la explotación(1969) by Pablo González Casanova

La Revolución India(1970) by Fausto Reynaga

Selections from Indios, ejército y fronteras(1982) by David Viñas

Selections from Oprimidos pero no vencidos: luchas del campesinado aymara y qhechwa de Bolivia, 1900-1980(1986) and from Violencia (re)encubiertas en Bolivia(2012) by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui

Selections of poetry from Como el sol / Je’ Bix K’in(1998)  by Briceida Cuevas Cob

Llanthupi Munakuy / Quererse en las sombras(film, 2001) by Marcelina Cárdenas 

“Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America” (2000) by Aníbal Quijano

Selections of poetry fromPewma dungu / Palabras soñadas(2003) by Leonel Lienlaf; fromÜl (2005) by Adriana Paredes Pinda; and fromMapurbe: Venganza a raíz(2005) by David Añiñir

 “La necesidad política de la reconstrucción epistémica de los saberes ancestrales” by Luis Macas from Pueblos Indígenas, Estado y Democracia(2005)

Selections from ¡… Escucha winka…! Cuatro ensayos sobre de historia nacional mapuche y un epílogo sobre el futuro(2006) by Pablo Marimán et. al.

“Introducción” by several authors fromTa iñ fijke xipa rakizuameluwün. Historia, colonialismo y resistencia desde el país Mapuche (Ediciones Comunidad de Historia Mapuche, 2012)

“Awükan ka kiuxankan zugu kiñeke rakizuam” by Enrique Antileo, Luis Cárcamo-Huechante, Margarita Calfío and Herson Huinca-Puitrin from Awükan ka kuxankan zugu Wajmapu mew. Violencias coloniales en el Wajmapu(Comunidad de Historia Mapuche, 2015)

Hilando fino desde el feminismo comunitario(2008) by Julieta Paredes

“Construcción social de la identidad genérica y étnica” (2011) by Emma Chirix

Historical Documents

“Manifiesto de Tiwanaku” (Bolivia, 1973)

“Declaración de Iximche’” (Guatemala, 1980)

“La lucha de los pueblos autónomos” (Sierra Norte, Oaxaca, Mexico, 1982)

“Declaración” by Ad Mapu (Temuco, Chile, 1980) and “Declaración” by Awkiñ Wallmapu Ngülam/Consejo de Todas las Tierras (Temuco, Chile, 1992)

“Primera declaración del EZLN” (Chiapas, Mexico, 1994)

Other Readings and Dialogues

Damnés de la terre[The Wretched of the Earth] (1963) by Frantz Fanon

Selection from The Idea of Africa(1994) by V.Y. Mudimbe

Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples(1999) by Linda Tuhiwai Smith

Selections from Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism(1999) by Craig S. Womack

“Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native” (2006) by Patrick Wolfe

Selections from Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective(2008)

“A Declaration of Indian Rights: The B.C. Indian Position Paper” (United States, 1970)

“The Trail of Broken Treaties” (Canada, 1972) 

“Idle No More” (2012)

Examines how indigenous writers, artists, and cultural producers have established their own voices and languages through writing and other forms of media. Analysis of the indigenous artistic and intellectual production in concrete political and cultural contexts.

Topic 1: Indigenous Voices in Latin American Literature.

Topic 2: The Imagined Andes.

Topic 3: Contemporary Mesoamerican Indigenous Literatures. Examines the early Mesoamerican mythological narrative, Popol Wuj, as well as twentieth-century Central American texts. Explores ethnicity, class, gender, and traditional cultures as main factors in regional negotiations of identity constructions.

Study of important themes or issues in the cultural production of the Latin American world. Among the regions studied are Spain; North, Central, and South America; the Caribbean; and related areas in Africa.

Topic 1: Fantastic Fiction from Latin America. Analysis of short stories by Latin American writers that in some way represent an alternative to realism.

Topic 2: Nonfiction Narratives from Latin America. Study of nonfiction works written in contemporary Latin America as experimental narrative forms that offer insight about current political, social, and economic problems of the region. Examination of these realities through readings and careful analysis of the works of popular nonfiction Latin American writers.

Topic 3: Jewish Voices from Latin America. Overview of popular Jewish writers from Brazil and Spanish America, with special emphasis on those who portray in their work the situation of the Jewish communities of their respective cities and countries.

Topic 4: Sex and Sexuality in Latin America. Examines different representations of sex, sexuality, and eroticism in the various cultures of Latin America. These concepts do not refer to explicit or provocative texts or images in books, films, or photographs alone. On the contrary, they include a vast gamut of life, love, pain, and social conflict.

Topic 5: Revolutionary Imagination in Latin American Cultures. Explores literary expressions in Latin America that reflect a dissident or transgressive imaginary published during the revolutionary period (1960-1990). Examination of how different sociohistorical experiences require new narrative forms, and innovative ways of exploring and codifying collective community identities.

Topic 6: Violence in Contemporary Mexican Culture. Studies the representation of violence in contemporary literary and cultural production in Mexico in order to understand social, political, and cultural implications of current violence there. Taught in Spanish.

Topic 7: East/West/New World Encounters. Survey of works mostly in the Latin American and Hispanic literary tradition in which images or themes related to the East (Asia, Eastern Africa, the Middle East) are developed.

Topic 8: Memory and Writing in Caribbean Culture. Studies literary works from the greater Caribbean basin (with a focus on Cuba and Puerto Rico) in which the act of remembering is emphatically dramatized and described.

Topic 9: Literary Figurations in the Multimedia Age. Focuses on the figurations of sounds and images in literary language in the context of the multimedia environment of modern and contemporary Latin America.

Description: Since 1990s, the question of territory and territorial rights has been a foundational concept and imaginary in the indigenous resurgence movement throughout the Americas, or Abya Yala—the native Kuna term to name the whole continent. Against narratives of “de-territorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari) that prevailed in the terrain of “high theory” in late twentieth century, indigenous movement—already in the 1990s—placed the concept and imaginary of the territory as a fundamental notion in local and global political and cultural imagination. Usually, and mistakenly, indigenous notions of territory tend to be reduced to the land; however, for many native communities, it also includes the waters of rivers, lakes and oceans; the air and ether; material and spiritual domains. The present seminar will engage this indigenous politico-cultural articulation in order to explore the ways poetics and politics of the territory have shaped not only indigenous views but also literary, cultural, and historical discourses from other ethnic, racial, cultural and social agents in Latin America, in conjunction with colonial and anti-colonial histories. Furthermore, we will also discuss neighboring categories such as space, place, and border (frontera) as well as the ways in which territorial claims have become juxtaposed with new processes of diasporization; in this regard, the seminar will problematize to what extent the politics and poetics of diasporas may diverge, or perhaps mirror, previously held notions of deterritorialization and nomadism.  Finally, we will closely examine the acoustic, visual, geographical, racial, animal, human, bodily and spiritual senses of the territory as dimensions that play a critical role in the deployment of colonial and anti-colonial politics, engaging fields such as geography, sound studies, visual culture, environmental studies, and oceanic studies. Materials will include non-fiction prose, novels, poetry, chronicles, documentary video, video art, film, music, and historiographical and cartographical sources, especially from countries such as Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia.

Bibliography and Media Sources

1. Literature:

Mariluán; Un drama en el campo (Chile, 1862) by Alberto Blest Gana

Una excursión a los indios ranqueles (Argentina, 1870) by Lucio Mansilla

Selections fromMaremoto (Chile, 1969) by Pablo Neruda

Selections from En Cuba (1972) by Ernesto Cardenal

Selections from Summa de Maqroll El Gaviero (Colombia, 1990;1973) by Alvaro Mutis

Imágenes paceñas (Bolivia, 1979) by Jaime Sáenz

Purgatorio (Chile, 1979) Raúl Zurita

Montacerdos (Peru, 1981) by Cronwell Jara

La esquina es mi corazón: crónica urbana (Chile, 1995) by Pedro Lemebel

La villa (Argentina, 2001) and Embalse (Argentina, 2003) by César Aira

El Ghetto (Argentina, 2003) by Tamara Kamenszain

Omnibus (Argentina, 2006) by Elvio Gandolfo

Selections fromPewma dungu / Palabras soñadas (2003) by Leonel Lienlaf

Selections fromÜl (2005) by Adriana Paredes Pinda

Selections fromMapurbe: Venganza a raíz (Chile, 2005) by David Añiñir

Phaqar Kirki o Cantos a las flores (Bolivia, 2006) by Elvira Espejo

Formas de volver a casa (Chile, 2011) by Alejandro Zambra

Volverse Palestina (USA/Chile, 2013) by Lina Meruane

2.  Films and Audio-Visual Sources

Punalka: el Alto Bío-Bío (Chile, 1995) by Jeannette Paillan

El velo de Berta (Chile, 2005) by director Esteban Larraín

Nostalgia de la luz (Chile, 2010) by Patricio Guzmán

El vuelco del cangrejo (Colombia, film, 2011)

Yvy Maraey, Tierra sin Mal (Bolivia, 2013) by Juan Carlos Valdivia

La Tentación del Nixhix (Bolivia, 2015) by Gumercindo Yumani, Nicolas Ipamo, Ruben Dario Cayaduro, Martha Zelady, Marcelina Cárdenas y Franklin Gutiérrez (Bolivia)

3. Literary, Cultural, Theoretical, and Historical Essays

Selections from Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (1928) by Jose Carlos Mariátegui

Selections from Anti-Oedipus (1972) by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

Indios, ejército y fronteras (1982) by David Viñas

“Diasporas” (1994) by James Clifford

Selections fromSpaces of Hope (USA, 2000) by David Harvey

Selections from“Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native” (Australia, 2006) by Patrick Wolfe

Selections from ¡… Escucha winka…! Cuatro ensayos sobre de historia nacional mapuche y un epílogo sobre el futuro (Chile, 2006) by Pablo Marimán et. al.

Selections fromTerritories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (2008) by Arturo Escobar

Selections fromAcoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (2010) by Brandon Labelle

“The Prospect of Oceanic Studies” (2010) by Hester Blum

“Democracia liberal y democracia del Ayllu” from Violencia (re)encubiertas en Bolivia (2012) and Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: Una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores (2010) by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui

Selections from Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (2013) by Douglas Kahn

Selections from Earth Politics: Religion, Decolonization, and Bolivia’s Indigenous Intellectuals (2014) by Waskar Ari

“Capítulo IV: La provincia: el mapa de la zona, un más allá de la fractura y la derrota” from Buenos Aires y las provincias. Relatos para desarmar (2014) by Laura Demaria.

Examines how indigenous writers, artists, and cultural producers have established their own voices and languages through writing and other forms of media. Analysis of the indigenous artistic and intellectual production in concrete political and cultural contexts.

Study of important themes or issues in the cultural production of the Latin American world. Among the regions studied are Spain; North, Central, and South America; the Caribbean; and related areas in Africa.

Topic 1: Fantastic Fiction from Latin America. Analysis of short stories by Latin American writers that in some way represent an alternative to realism.

Topic 2: Nonfiction Narratives from Latin America. Study of nonfiction works written in contemporary Latin America as experimental narrative forms that offer insight about current political, social, and economic problems of the region. Examination of these realities through readings and careful analysis of the works of popular nonfiction Latin American writers.

Topic 3: Jewish Voices from Latin America. Overview of popular Jewish writers from Brazil and Spanish America, with special emphasis on those who portray in their work the situation of the Jewish communities of their respective cities and countries.

Topic 4: Sex and Sexuality in Latin America. Examines different representations of sex, sexuality, and eroticism in the various cultures of Latin America. These concepts do not refer to explicit or provocative texts or images in books, films, or photographs alone. On the contrary, they include a vast gamut of life, love, pain, and social conflict.

Topic 5: Revolutionary Imagination in Latin American Cultures. Explores literary expressions in Latin America that reflect a dissident or transgressive imaginary published during the revolutionary period (1960-1990). Examination of how different sociohistorical experiences require new narrative forms, and innovative ways of exploring and codifying collective community identities.

Topic 6: Violence in Contemporary Mexican Culture. Studies the representation of violence in contemporary literary and cultural production in Mexico in order to understand social, political, and cultural implications of current violence there. Taught in Spanish.

Topic 7: East/West/New World Encounters. Survey of works mostly in the Latin American and Hispanic literary tradition in which images or themes related to the East (Asia, Eastern Africa, the Middle East) are developed.

Topic 8: Memory and Writing in Caribbean Culture. Studies literary works from the greater Caribbean basin (with a focus on Cuba and Puerto Rico) in which the act of remembering is emphatically dramatized and described.

Topic 9: Literary Figurations in the Multimedia Age. Focuses on the figurations of sounds and images in literary language in the context of the multimedia environment of modern and contemporary Latin America.

DESCRIPTION

Radio has played a major role in popular culture as well as in the subjective and collective imagination of individuals and communities in Latin America since the early twentieth century to the present. In this process, literary and cultural works have become shaped and immersed in radio culture, and radio has acquired a powerful literary, aesthetic, and cultural life. This seminar will focus on the ways in which this process has forged a radio-phonic imaginary in poetry, short stories, novels, chronicles, and essays within the field of literature as well as in the realm of the arts. In order to address these key questions, this course will examine how radio culture is literally and figuratively registered and performed in literary writing and in the arts. Strong focus will be put on the role of voices, narratives, sound aesthetics, auditory culture, language and the senses, the culture of radionovela or radioteatro, and the history of radio and sound technology in Latin America. The seminar will review and include a critical and theoretical corpus that is central to contemporary debates in the emerging cross-disciplinary field of sound studies, in conjunction with recent critical developments in literary and cultural studies, performance studies, media studies, speech act theory, and anthropology of the senses, anthropology of radio, phenomenology, and acoustic ecology. Our discussion will also link the literary and cultural life of radio to issues of local and national politics, ethnic, racial and gender representation, colonial histories, anti-colonial struggles, and questions of cultural imperialism and globalization.  

Grading Policy

This course will use the plus/minus grading scale for each of the assignments as well as for the final grade.

The final grade will be determined by the following requirements:

1. Attendance 15%

2. Participation in class discussions 25%

3.  Research Paper (RP) 60%: an aprox.15-page research paper on a specific topic addressed in the seminar, reflecting the research interest of the student in sound culture. We will not schedule this research paper for the end of the semester but rather we will start working on it by the middle of the semester in order to set up a process of outlining, drafting, editing, and critical and self-critical revision around the task of writing a research paper.  The instructor will closely follow this process with planned meetings with each member of the seminar. Our RP agenda is: proposal: 10%. preliminary draft: 20 %.; final draft: 20%.; abstract: 10%.

Requisites

Graduate students with knowledge of Spanish are automatically admitted into the seminar.  Students from the PhD in Spanish are required to write in Spanish; students from other graduate programs can write in English, Spanish, or Portuguese.

Readings and Bibliography

1. Critical and Theoretical Works

Barbero, Jesus Martin. De los medios a las mediaciones (1987)

Bessire, Lucas and Daniel Fisher. Eds. Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound (2012)

Bronfman, Alejandra and Andrew Grant Wood. Media, Sound & Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean (2012)

Chow, Rey and James Steintrager, Eds. The Sense of Sound (2011).

Franz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (1965).

Ihde, Don. Listening and Voice: Phenomenology of Sound (2008).

Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (trans. 1999; 1986)

Kun, Josh. Audiotopia: Music, Race and America (2005).

Lacan, Jacques. Radiophonie (1970)

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Á l’écoute (2002).

Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982).

Perloff, Marjorie and Craig Dworkin. The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound (2009).

Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and The Tuning of the World (1994) [1977].

This course will analyze and discuss the place of poetry in the public and historical setting of the Southern Cone of Latin America—that is, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay—since the 1970s to the present.

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

This course is an introductory survey of certain theories and discourses relevant to the study of Latin American and Iberian literatures and cultures. The course aims to introduce, discuss and analyze past and contemporary theoretical movements and their influence on and relevance for the analysis of Latin American and Iberian Literatures and Cultures. The readings will consist of selected passages from works of literary theory and criticism—Formalism, Post-Structuralism, Psychoanalysis, Deconstructionism, Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Feminism-Gender and Queer Theory, Decolonization Theory, Media and Performance Studies and Globalization-U.S. Latin@ Studies. The course focuses on theories in the context of literature and culture as well as their relevance for interdisciplinary approaches in other fields. The course seeks to help students read and understand cultural texts as well as train them for specialized academic writing, critical analysis and critical thinking.

Our weekly meetings will be dedicated to each theoretical movement to analyze theories and authors in their socio-historical context. Students will have weekly oral presentations in English, Spanish or Portuguese, and will dedicate the first weeks of the course to preparing their weekly writings based on the readings. In their weekly writings students will summarize the main content of the article-as well as prepare two or three questions about the readings with the aim of addressing and discussing the main thesis or theories developed in it. By the second-week of the semester students will choose a mentor in their area of specialization with whom they will develop a professional relationship and who will work directly with the student in the development of the research paper. A draft of the research paper with a bibliography will be completed by the end of the first semester. Students will complete their final research paper in their second semester. Students will be graded by their concise analysis of theoretical readings, their writing, their oral presentations and their participation in class. Participation and attendance are required for all entering students.

REQUIREMENTS AND GRADING:

1 term paper, 15-20 pages                                                      30%

1 15-20-minute research topic presentation                                 20%

1 15-20-minute oral presentation                                              20%

Weekly writings                                                                    30%

TEXTBOOKS AND/OR CLASS MATERIALS:

A reader of theoretical works and authors

DESCRIPTION

Description:

How does the relationship between sound, language and representation work in literary and cultural production in modern and contemporary Latin America? How does sound interweave with the language of the image? To what extent are our reading practices shaped by auditory memories and cultures? Do reading, viewing, and listening constitute interconnected fields of reception and interpretation in our sensorial and aesthetic experiences? How do sonic imaginaires relate to the construction of political, social and cultural identities and differences? In order to address these key questions, this course will examine how soundscapes are figuratively constructed and performed in literary texts as well as in oral and audiovisual media (film, radio, and music). This seminar will engage critical perspectives from literary criticism, cultural anthropology, philosophy, musicology, media theory, and performance studies; more specifically, we will review and discuss a set of theories that are central to the debates in the emerging field of sound studies.

Literary and cultural texts:  

Selection of poems by César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, and Alfonsina Storni

Andamios interiores, Poemas radiográficos (1922) de Manuel Maples Arce

Radio (poema inalámbrico en trece mensajes) (1924) de Luis Quintanilla

Canto kechwa (1938) by José María Arguedas

De donde son los cantantes (1967) de Severo Sarduy

El vampiro de la Colonia Roma (1979) by Luis Zapata

Sonata cafiola (2008) by Pedro Lemebel

“Wünül: concierto de pájaros” (video) and poems by Lorenzo Aillapán (Mapuche)

Je' bix k'in/Como el sol (1998) by Briceida Cuevas Con

“Tijeretazos” (short story) by Lina Meruane

Selection of films, music, and samples of radio shows

Theoretical readings:

The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound (2009) by Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin eds.

Listening (2007) by Jean-Luc Nancy

Audiotopia: Music, Race and America (2005) by Josh Kun

Mexican Modernity: the Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution (2005) by Rúben Gallo 

Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity (2004) by Veit Erlmann

The Auditory Culture Reader (2003) by Michael Bull and Les Back, eds.

Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002) by Susan Stewart

Audio-vision: sound on screen (1994) by Michel Chion

Escribir en el aire: ensayos sobre la heterogeneidad socio-cultural en las literaturas andinas (1994) by Antonio Cornejo Polar

La voz y su huella: escritura y conflicto étnico-social en América Latina 1492-1988 (1991) by Martin Lienhard

Performance Theory by Richard Schechner (1988)

Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (1982) by Steven Feld

Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982) by Walter Ong

The Pursuits of Signs by (1981) by Jonathan Culler 

Listening and Voice: Phenomenology of Sound (1976) by Don Ihde

Grading Policy and Course Requirements

Grading Policy

The final grade will be determined by the following requirements:

-Attendance 10%

-Participation in class and Blackboard discussions 25%.

Students are expected to actively contribute to discussions in classroom as well as to participate in the Discussion Forum on the Blackboard, posting at least one question or commentary per week (before Sunday midnight, prior to next class) in regard to the texts, materials and/or issues under scrutiny in the course.

-Oral presentation in class 10%

-Mid-term critical essay 15% (a 5-7 page essay on any of the readings of the first part of the course). Deadline: November 16.

-Final Paper 40% (a 12-15 page research paper on a specific topic addressed in the seminar). Deadline: December 12.

Requisites

Graduate students with knowledge of Spanish are automatically admitted in the seminar; advanced undergraduate students can only enroll with special permission of the instructor. 

This course aims to provide a panoramic view on key issues in the cultural history of Latin America. Our emphasis will be on the cultures of power relations and social change in the region, with particular attention to the role of intellectual production, media and cultural expression in these processes. Within this framework, we will scrutinize the following topics: cultures of [power (i.e., colonialisms, patriarchalism, homophobia, racisms, paternalism, authoritarianisms, populisms); anti-colonial struggles; nation-state formation; slavery; indigenous cultures and peoples; cultures of authoritarianism and democracies; women, sexual minorities, and social change; and the new cultures of immigration, diasporas, and globalization.

Through the critical scrutiny of the aforementioned topics, this course will pursue the following specific goals,

1. To understand the heterogeneity of histories and cultures that form part of Latin America across historical periods and geographical boundaries;
2. To train students in the use of conceptual and technical tools for the creative analysis and interpretation of cultural subjects and their representation in language;
3. To provides students methodological tools for academic writing and critical reading;
4. To practice speaking skills through a brief oral presentation in group discussion
5. To use the Benson Collection in order to support the writing of the essay for the class; and, 
6. To be able to respectfully share, discuss, reflect on and self-critique ideas.

This course focuses on the figurations of sounds and images in literary language in the context of modern and contemporary Latin America. We will study and discuss the rhetorical ways in which the impressions of the senses, particularly in terms of the relationship between writing, visual and sound culture, take shape in literature. Therefore, the course will be organized around basic literary figures (such as ekphrasis, calligram, onomatopoeia, interjection, and synesthesia), aesthetic constructions (such as rhythm and image) and discursive performance (voice, monologue, dialogue, polyphony), across genres and historical periods. The organization of the course around these multiple procedures will offer the students a specific training in the critical use of concepts that are relevant for the analysis of language and literary representation. In addition, this discussion will allow us to look at literature as a discourse immersed in a multimedia ecology, in which there are a variety of dimensions of language that coexist and intertwine: the language of nature, animal sounds, human senses, oral community traditions, radio, music, painting, cinema, and digital media. Special attention will be paid to the crossings of Western, Criollo, Indigenous, and African traditions in the literary and extra-literary realm of sounds and images.

Sequel to Spanish 322K and 328, approaching in a more specialized way the study of important currents in Hispanic civilization.

The Criollo and Indigenous Subjects in the Andes and the Southern Cone

This course examines the constructions of criollo subjects as well as the representation and self-representation of indigenous peoples in the literary and cultural production of the Andes and the Southern Cone of Latin America. Historically, we will cover the period beginning with the founding of nation-states in early nineteenth-century to the current era of globalization. We will analyze the ways in which the sujeto popular criollo is constructed and imagined in canonical literary and cultural texts, the indigenista representations of native peoples, and the practices of self-representation in texts linked to Quechua, Aymara, Mapuche and Native Amazonian traditions and authors. Readings will include works that are associated with trends such as gauchesca, Peruvian popular traditions, criollismo, indianismo, indigenismo, and autonomous indigenous poetics. We will study songs, legends, testimony, letters, poetry, short stories, and novels. Paintings, comics, films, lyrics, and radio shows will be also included.

In order to investigate the issues of coloniality, territory, recognition and self-recognition, representation and self-representation, some of the key questions we will address include the following: How do oral and written traditions interrelate in both criollo and indigenous texts? What is the relationship of these non-indigenous and indigenous forms of representation to dominant “national” constructions of the literary canon? What are the politics of recognition, self-recognition and agency that emerge from the texts under scrutiny? How do they relate to the framework of the hegemonic nation-states and issues of “internal colonialism” in the region? Within the context of modern and contemporary times, to what extent do these literatures subject their representation and agency to the universality of a Westernizing, neocolonial criollo  nation-state? And finally, to what extent do these texts engage with the potential of “autonomous” indigenous politics of territory—in particular, that of ayllu (communal land in the Andes), tawantinsuyu (the ancient Inca territory), and wallmapu (the notion of Mapuche nationhood)? 

Grading Policy:

The final grade will be determined by the following requirements:

Attendance 10%

Participation in class discussions 15%

Mid-term paper 15% (a 5-7 page essay on any of the readings of the first part of the course)

Presentation in class (on the research topic for the final paper) 10%

Final Paper 50% (a 12-15 page research paper on a specific topic addressed in the seminar)

Readings:

Primary Readings:

Martin Fierro by José  Hernández

Selections from Tradiciones peruanas by Ricardo Palma

Manifestos by Tupaj Katari (selection)

Cartas mapuches (selection)

Una excursión a los indios ranqueles by Lucio Mansilla

Selections from Cumandá o un drama entre salvajes by Juan León Mera

Raza de bronce by Alcides Arguedas

Selections from Canto kechwa by José María Arguedas

Selections of poems by Andrés Alencastre

Los ríos profundos  by José María Arguedas

Mi despertar by Ana María Condori (Aymara)

Selections of Contemporary Quechua poets (Dida Aguirre, Eduardo Ninamango, Odi Gonzales)

Selections of Contemporary Mapuche poets (Leonel Lienlaf, Elicura Chihuailaf, Jaime Huenún, Liliana Ancalao, Roxana Miranda Rupailaf)

Native Amazonian literature from Ecuador and Peru (Course Reader)

Literary and Cultural Criticism:

Poesía quechua by Jesús Lara

Escribir en el aire by Antonio Cornejo Polar

El género gauchesco by Josefina Ludmer

Indios, ejército y frontera and Literatura argentina y realidad política by David Viñas

Oprimidos pero no vencidos: Luchas del campesinado aymara y qhechwa de Bolivia, 1900-1980 by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui

Supplementary theoretical and critical materials (Course Reader) 

Requisites:

Graduate students with knowledge of Spanish are automatically admitted in the seminar; advanced undergraduate students can only enroll with special permission of the instructor. 

SPN 380K Graduate Seminar Spring 2011

Aesthetics And Politics Of Voices

Conducted in Spanish

Listed as: SPN 380k; LAS 392S           Course Unique Number: 47255 

Schedule of Class Meetings: Tuesday and Thursday 2:00pm-3:30pm

Room: BEN 1.118

Instructor: Prof. Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante 

E-mail address: carcamohuechante@austin.utexas.edu

Office Hours: Friday 10:00 to 12:00; Office: BEN 3.146 

Course Description

In the field of literature, we often talk about the subjects of literary texts as “speakers” and readers as “audience.” The written domain of literature is imagined as a scene of speaking and listening. With this in mind, this graduate seminar will examine the ways in which voices and sounds work in literary language and representation. Key questions to be addressed are: How does the representation of voices and sounds enrich the aesthetic and sensorial effects of literary texts? What is the role of silence in literary language? To what extent is literature a sensorium of the sounds, noises and voices that constitute public imagination in specific historical contexts? How do writers’ ideologies, cultural backgrounds, locations, ethnicities or gender/sex identities impact the types of voices and sounds that are present in their literary works? What is the role of literary genres in this process? How do literary representations of voice and sound relate to other sound media, such as the gramophone, radio, the telephone, film, or music?

Our discussion will be anchored in the study of literary texts from modern and contemporary Latin America. Theoretical materials will be drawn from literary criticism, anthropology, philosophy, cultural studies, and media studies.

The Signature Course (UGS 302 and 303) introduces first-year students to the university’s academic community through the exploration of new interests. The Signature Course is your opportunity to engage in college-level thinking and learning.

Main literary trends and principal writers in Spanish America from the sixteenth century through Modernism.

Please check back for updates.

Sequel to Spanish 322K and 328, approaching in a more specialized way the study of important currents in Hispanic civilization.