LAST121 Tales of Resistance: Modernity and the Latin American Short Story (In English)

Latin American writers from the early 20th century forward have regarded the short story as a vehicle through which to make their mark and engage the great cultural issues of the day. Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, two of Latin America's most well-known literary figures, dedicated their careers almost exclusively to the genre. In this course, as we consider the privileged status of the short story in Latin American letters, we will examine the ways in which writers have used the genre to comment on important aspects of modernization both within and outside their respective countries. Some of those aspects will concern the Mexican Revolution, bourgeois and mass culture, nationalism, globalization, as well as immigration to Europe and the United States.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: RL&L121
Prereq: None

LAST126 Intro to History: Heretics on Trial: The Holy Inquisition and Its Enemies

The Inquisition was among the most feared institutions of the early modern West. In its efforts to impose religious orthodoxy, it persecuted minorities, prohibited behaviors it deemed heretical--like magic and unbelief--and censored intellectual inquiry. Yet despite its resoluteness, the ability of the Catholic Church to impose control varied widely across time and place and was often met with equally firm resistance. This introductory course examines how the Catholic Inquisition functioned, from its origins in the medieval period to its final demise in the nineteenth century, paying particular attention to geographic and temporal specificities. From Cartagena de Indias to Lima, Goa, Rome, and Toledo, inquisitorial tribunals spanned a significant portion of the Atlantic world. The records produced by its scribes are some of the richest sources of the social, cultural, religious, and economic history of the era, yet they are also some of the most challenging to deal with, both epistemologically and morally. Historians have relied on Inquisition archives to reconstruct the lives of individuals and communities who left no other written records, all the while seeking to acknowledge that the records were produced under duress by officials who suspected the accused of the terrible crime of heresy. Through a wide range of primary sources like trial transcriptions, Inquisition "autobiographies," written confessions, censored books, and literary sources, students will both survey the lives of people who faced the Inquisition's scrutiny, while considering the role of violence, persecution, and resistance in the creation of the very records that allow for historical reconstruction.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST173
Prereq: None

LAST200 Colonialism and Its Consequences in the Americas

Why does colonialism matter to the fields of American Studies, Latin American Studies, and Caribbean Studies? What have been the consequences of colonialism for peoples of the Western Hemisphere? This course offers a transnational approach to the study of colonial modernity through a comparative analysis of colonial ventures and their far-reaching consequences. With a focus on the interactions of Indigenous, European, and African peoples, the course introduces a diverse range of issues and topics, such as the organization of production, including chattel slavery, indenture, and free labor; imperial competition and state formation; emancipation struggles; and Indigenous sovereignty.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST200
Prereq: None

LAST218 From Chocolate to Coca: Commodities and the Making of Latin America

Bananas, silver, and coffee connect Latin America to consumers across the globe. From the discovery of massive silver deposits in Potosí in the 16th century to the growth of the illegal drug industry in the 20th century, these commodities have shaped how people work and eat, not only in Latin America but worldwide. Everyday goods like sugar or rubber have also given rise to political revolutions, environmental destruction, scientific discovery, and new literary and artistic movements across the region. How do commodities shape the societies that produce or consume them? What commodities are shaping today's global economy? Is it possible to extract these goods in a sustainable way?



This course combines approaches from anthropology, history of science, and environmental history to study key commodities in the history of Latin America from the colonial period until the present day. It will examine the ways in which various material goods linked local actors to broad networks of production and consumption of an increasingly interconnected global economy. The course will pay particular attention to how these relationships irretrievably changed local communities and to the ways in which historical actors contested, adapted to, or transformed production and consumption regimes.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST257
Prereq: None

LAST219 Latin American Economic Development-Macro

In this course, we try to understand the puzzle of differential economic development of Latin America as a region and its countries in particular. Our lens of analysis is employing economic tools but also draws on other disciplines such as history and sociology. The course covers a broad range of economics and introduces you to aspects of macroeconomics, microeconomics, international economics, labor and development economics. Initially, we will study different ways to measure development in Latin America. We will then begin our journey to identify reasons and causes for various development outcomes of the Latin American region and differential economic success and failure of specific countries. In the first half of the semester we will examine the historical background and endowments, policies of export-led growth and import-substitution, the debt crisis and the subsequent stabilization. We will cover the financial crisis of the late 1990s and the early 2000s. Then we will turn our focus to the recent years and challenges to economics growth in Latin America and Latin American countries. Here, we will assess trade, investment climate, poverty, and inequality in the region. The situation and policies addressing the informal economy, education and health in Latin America will be discussed in detail. Thereafter, we will analyze gender and ethnicity in the context of Latin American development.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ECON
Identical With: ECON261
Prereq: ECON101 OR ECON110

LAST226 Survey of Latin American Literatures, Cultures, and Ideas

A close study of texts from the colonial period to the present will serve as the basis for a discussion of some of the major ideas and cultural and political debates that have emerged in modern Latin America to this day. Thinkers include Las Casas, Sor Juana, Bolívar, Sarmiento, Martí, Neruda, Borges, García Márquez, Menchú, and Bolaño, among others. For purposes of understanding context, students will also read selected chapters from works by historians and cultural critics and will watch several films. (Please note that this course was previously called "Spanish American Literature and Civilization.")
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN270
Prereq: SPAN221

LAST229 Between Worlds: Change and Continuity in Early Latin America

The conquest and colonization of the Americas challenged long-held assumptions about geography, time, history, nature, theology, and humanity for both indigenous societies and Europeans. Modern scholars have described the encounter either as an earth-shattering moment of revolutionary intellectual reverberations or, alternatively, as one of limited and slower impact.



This course examines the ways in which diverse actors in the Iberian colonial world confronted change and continuity in their societies. In particular, it seeks to understand how they approached the conquest and its environmental, political, religious, legal, and social repercussions. Through the study of chronicles, graphic materials, poetry, omens, grammars, and maps, we will look at how missionaries, indigenous scholars, scientists, and nuns interpreted the forces transforming their communities. We will pay particular attention to the traditions and practices that they mobilized to explain the past and convey its present and future significance. Major themes include religious conversion and its consequences, the emergence of new social and ethnic identities under colonial institutions, linguistic change, and the writing of history.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST356
Prereq: None

LAST232 Dialogue of Poets: Classical and 20th-Century Poetry in Spain and Latin America

This course samples the rich tradition of Spanish-language verse from its beginnings to the present. It is organized around four primary dialogues: (1) the creative reception by leading 20th-century poets from Spain and Latin America (e.g., Neruda, Lorca, Machado, Borges, Paz, Rossetti) of classical poets (Saint John of the Cross, Góngora, Quevedo, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz); (2) the interplay of poetry and essays by those same poets; (3) the round-trip fertilization of popular and elite, oral and written forms of poetry; and (4) the crossing of linguistic, ethnic, religious, and gender boundaries that has shaped Spanish-language verse from its beginnings as love lyrics embedded in Hebrew and Arabic poems (jarchas) to the creative stimulus of other Romance languages (especially Galician and Catalan) in Spain, through Latin American poets open to Amerindian and African influences, and Hispanic-American poets exploring bilingualism in the U.S. We will read lyric, epic, and burlesque verse on a wide variety of themes (mysticism, sex, history, reason, travel, love, politics, sensory perception, death, and poetry itself); reflect on how poetry can best be enjoyed and understood; and consider how poetry has been produced, heard, read, and used (ritual and spontaneous song; minstrel performance of epic and ballads; courtly patronage, literary academies, and manuscript circulation; private reading of printed texts and commodification; and 20th-century singer-songwriter musical settings and politics). Although no prior expertise in poetry is expected, a willingness to engage it closely (textually and historically) is essential.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN232, COL226
Prereq: SPAN221

LAST240 From the Banjo to Dembow: Afro-Caribbean Music in Motion

This course analyzes the global circulation of Afro-Caribbean musicians, dancers, audiences, musical styles, and even musical instruments from the beginning of European colonialism to the present day. We will seek to understand the political interconnections between the Caribbean and the wider world by focusing our attention on specific "musical itineraries." These will include, among others, the creation of the banjo by enslaved people in the Caribbean and the instrument's role in black resistance in North and South America, the musical aftershocks of the Haitian Revolution in Cuba and Louisiana, the production of black internationalist politics at weekly "regge" dances led by Jamaicans in early 20th-century Costa Rica, and the rise of reggaetón between Panama, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and the United States.



We will question how these musical itineraries propelled black political movements and shaped larger ideas about race, nation, diaspora, and the meaning of "the Caribbean" itself. No prior musical knowledge is required for this course.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-LAST
Identical With: AFAM240
Prereq: None

LAST242 Histories of the Caribbean: New Questions, Methods, and Vantage Points

This course explores some of the most exciting new trends in historical scholarship on the Caribbean. We will consider how recent scholars of the Caribbean have turned a critical eye to existing methods and reimagined "archives" as they have crafted new stories about gender, sexuality, race, the environment, and the rise of modern capitalism. In this way, we will question how these new directions in Caribbean studies have reshaped the study of history more generally. We will use a wide geographic lens in order to gain an expansive vision of the circuits of the Greater Caribbean, stretching from Antigua, Guadeloupe, Barbados, Martinique, Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Haiti into the wider Atlantic world.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-LAST
Identical With: AMST252
Prereq: None

LAST244Z Imagining the End: Neoliberalism and the Arts

Many of us now like to paraphrase the philosopher Frederic Jameson when he argued that it has become "easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." As the recent deluge of post-apocalyptic movies and documentaries about melting glaciers makes clear, this is an accurate statement. Yet while most of us imagine how neoliberal capitalism will bring about the end of the world, others try to imagine the end of the status quo. Since neoliberalism became the global hegemonic system, artists of all kinds have been imagining ways we can survive and (perhaps) overcome it: think about the songs of Tracy Chapman or Residente, the street art of Keith Haring or Lady Pink, the movies of Chloe Zhao or Alejandro González Iñárritu, or the writings of Ursula Le Guin or Roberto Bolaño. This course explores how engaged art from the 1970s to the present has responded to -- and fought against -- neoliberal hegemony in the United States, Latin America, and beyond. Through the arts, we will explore the nightmares of global collapse and the dreams of a new egalitarian and sustainable society. In addition to analyzing movies, poems, short stories, songs, and street art, we will read theoretical and historical studies that help us understand how neoliberalism shapes contemporary culture and makes art into one of the few areas in which dissent can be expressed.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST244Z, HIST244Z
Prereq: None

LAST245 Modern Latin America Since 1810

This lecture course explores some of the main themes of Latin America's modern history from the beginning of the independence movements in the 19th century until the present day. In particular, it traces the contentious processes of state-formation and the creation of national and regional identities. Governments, elites, and popular movements fought over questions of race, economic development, and inequality in their attempts to formulate a particular vision of the nation. We will contextualize these struggles in global economic transformations and pay particular attention to the rise of the United States as force in the region.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST245
Prereq: None

LAST247 Caribbean Writers in the U.S. Diaspora

The Caribbean cloaks a complex history in a Club Med exterior. While white sands and palm trees proclaim it the "antidote to civilization," Caribbean writers undertake to represent a fuller picture of the individual in a world shaped by colonialism, slavery, nationalism, and cultural striving. This course will examine selected literary texts as part of an ongoing dialogue among the region's history, mythology, and aesthetics.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: GSAS247, AFAM243, ENGL243, AMST247
Prereq: None

LAST251 Cycles of Resistance: Indigenous Voices in Latin American Literature and Culture

This course explores the richness and diversity of Indigenous voices in Latin America, from early colonial records to contemporary expressions. Using a transhistorical methodology, we will examine how socio-political issues and topics like land defense, cultural resilience, gender violence, hybrid identity, and political resistance persist and evolve through diverse perspectives in Indigenous discourse and cultural production. We will analyze and compare foundational texts like the Popol Vuh and Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, as well as original manuscripts alongside contemporary voices such as those of Humberto Ak'abal, Yana Lucila Lema, and Sonia Guiñansaca. Special attention will be given to the writings of indigenous women, exploring how they have challenged hegemonic narratives and reclaimed their bodies and territories. Additionally, we will explore multimedia expressions and digital activism to understand how indigenous individuals and communities adapt and resist in a globalized world. This course invites students interested in literature, cultural studies, gender studies, and human rights to engage critically with indigenous perspectives, fostering a deeper understanding of the complexities of Latin American cultures.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN251
Prereq: SPAN221

LAST252 Race and Nation in Latin America

How does race operate in Latin America, and in what ways does it intersect with the concept of nation and national belonging? The regions we call Latin America and the Caribbean have, since the first human encounter between "Old" and "New" Worlds of the 15th century, been often understood as places of mixture--both cultural and biological. From at least the early 19th century, when independent nations in the region began to emerge from colonial rule, intellectuals, statesmen, and citizens alike have had to contend with "race" and its inextricable connection to the concept of "nation." This course aims to introduce students to the history of race and national formation in Latin America and the Caribbean, from the wake of the independence movements of the early 19th century to the present. It draws on historical, anthropological, and literary approaches to identifying, analyzing, and interpreting the varied meanings of race and nation throughout the region.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-LAST
Prereq: None

LAST254 Tales of Resistance: Modernity and the Latin American Short Story

Latin American writers from the early 20th century forward have regarded the short story as a vehicle through which to make their mark and engage the great cultural issues of the day. Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, two of Latin America's most well-known literary figures, dedicated their careers almost exclusively to the genre. In this course, as we consider the privileged status of the short story in Latin American letters, we will examine the ways in which writers have used the genre to comment on important aspects of modernization, both within and outside their respective countries. Some of those aspects will concern the Mexican Revolution, bourgeois and mass culture, nationalism, globalization, and immigration to Europe and the U.S.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN284
Prereq: None

LAST258 Bolívar's Interpreters: Nation Construction in the Americas

No figure has been seized upon more as a symbol of cultural and political unity in Latin America than the liberator Simón Bolívar. In this course, we will examine not only the case of contemporary Venezuela with its cult-like tradition but also several of the countless appropriations of Bolívar that have occurred across the Americas and in Europe in the 180 years since his death. From the Cuban José Martí to the Colombian García Márquez, from the Spaniard Miguel de Unamuno to the U.S. socialist Waldo Frank, from, to be sure, the powerful tradition of the Latin America essay with its identity politics to the U.S.-led Pan Americanism of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, Bolívar has been made to serve complex and important functions in discourse about national and continental identity. To consider all this, we will study a number of rewritings of Bolívar's life and works, focusing on the dynamic process in which literary, cultural, and political traditions have been formed around him, while giving special attention to issues bearing on race, gender, and modernization. A wide range of texts will be examined, including letters, essays, poems, novels, screenplays, and films.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN286
Prereq: None

LAST260 Neotropical Acuatic Ecosystems: Their Importance, Sustainable Use, and Conservation (CLAC 1.0)

(English translation below Spanish text) El curso de Ecosistemas Acuáticos Neotropicales permitirá a los estudiantes buscar información y discusión sobre la diversidad y complejidad de los ambientes acuáticos en la América tropical. Comenzaremos a aprender definiciones, características, distribución y ejemplos de humedales, lagos, ríos y muchos otros hábitats acuáticos en todo el neotrópico. El origen del sistema hidrológico. Evolución de las principales cuencas: Amazonas, Magdalena, Orinoco y Paraná. El Paleo Orinoco-Amazonía: Importancia geológica y biótica. Dinámica geológica. Evidencia geológica y biológica. Hipótesis evolutivas de la fauna piscícola. Evolución del paisaje amazónico como parte del conocimiento para comprender los diversos procesos y patrones de riqueza y distribución de la biodiversidad. Los humedales (sabanas inundadas) de Colombia-Venezuela como ejemplo de humedales neotropicales. El Pantanal brasileño y las llanuras colombo-venezolanas como "áreas de criadero" para la biota acuática y terrestre y su importancia para el mantenimiento de la biodiversidad. Los estudiantes también leerán y buscarán información sobre el Sistema Fluvial Orinoco como ejemplo de estudio. La importancia biótica, el desarrollo sostenible y la conservación. Identificar los factores antrópicos que afectan al sistema. El desarrollo social y económico, y las contribuciones a través de los Programas de Evaluaciones Acuáticas Rápidas (RAP's) como metodología para producir información que permitió proponer áreas para la conservación de la biodiversidad. Terminamos con un análisis de los recursos y la importancia pesquera de las principales cuencas neotropicales: Amazonas, Orinoco y Paraná-Paraguay. Seguridad alimentaria. Ejemplos de ríos en riesgo.



This course will examine why the Orinoco and Amazon basins in South America harbor a biological richness much larger than other river basins around the world. About 50% of all higher plant species of the world are included in these basins. Data on vertebrates showed that about 3,000 freshwater fish species, thousands of birds (migratory and local), and hundreds of amphibians, reptiles, and mammals have been found so far in those basins geographically included in six countries: Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. We will examine the key factors that have affected their historical-geological development, the actual richness, and the threats to sustainable development and conservation. We will ask questions about the nature and interactions of the key factors and agents that harbor and transformed the high ichthyological and other aquatic biota diversity, reflected by the wide range of landscapes and aquatic ecosystems included in those basins. We will try to identify fragile aquatic ecosystems depending upon the biological richness, endemicity, importance for local communities, and potential threats. We will examine the current trends in the fisheries, forest exploitation, and agriculture for human consumption, noting that stocks of many species of fish are in steep decline, and that current fishing practices are not sustainable. Finally, the major impacts and threats faced by the fishes and aquatic ecosystems of the Orinoco River Basin are discussed with the purpose of studying potential plans for sustainable development. The course is presented in a reading/discussion format in which all readings, writings, and discussions will be in Spanish.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: NSM-ENVS
Identical With: ENVS188, CGST266
Prereq: SPAN221

LAST265 Multilingual Aesthetics in Latin America

This course examines writings by Latin American authors who are multilingual or have an intercultural awareness as a result of colonization, cosmopolitanism, migration, or bicultural upbringing. First, students will learn about a variety of Spanish American movements, such as "modernismo," "creacionismo," "negrismo," "indigenismo," "neoindigenismo," and "indianismo," all of which dialogued with diverse cultures and languages other than Spanish. Then, we will examine a series of collaborative projects, such as a quadrilingual poem co-written by Octavio Paz (Mexico), Jacques Roubaud (France), Edoardo Sanguineti (Italy), and Charles Tomlinson (UK); a selection of English-Spanish poems by Marjorie Evasco (Philippines) and Alex Fleites (Cuba); and the "Festival de poesía: lenguas de América," a bi-annual event that gathers poets from diverse multilingual regions in the Americas. Lastly, we will examine literary and scholarly work by/about Latin American writers of indigenous descent, as well as works in Spanish, English, and "Spanglish" by Chicano, U.S. Latino, and Filipino American writers. Throughout the semester students will reflect on how multilingualism can serve as a medium for aesthetic experimentation, intercultural dialogue, and/or political resistance. All discussions will be held in Spanish, and all readings will be in their original Spanish or in Spanish/English translation.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN275
Prereq: SPAN221

LAST267 Caribbean Geographies

This course will explore how human and non-human encounters induced through slavery, indentureship and colonialism have been imagined and contested by Caribbean geographers, ecologists, artists, and poets. Students will gain an immense understanding of how Caribbean communities have experienced and countered geographic problems like uneven development, vaccine apartheid and gender-based violence. Students will think through concepts that define Caribbean geographies, such as 'the plot,' 'the bounty,' 'black land,' and the 'kala pani.'  
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: AFAM268
Prereq: None

LAST268 Black Religions in the Americas

This course will focus on the African-based religious systems that cultivated traditional ways to survive slavery, white supremacy, and state violence. We will focus on Vodou in Haiti, Regla de Ocha (Santeria) and Palo Mayombe in Cuba, Obeah in Jamaica, and aspects of Black religions in the US. We will discuss questions of method and themes of political resistance, orality, secrecy, magic, "authenticity," commodification, and the ethics of representation. We will also look at the Black church and especially the rise of the Pentecostal movement in African and Afro-Caribbean spaces, as well as visionary Black religious thought.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI268, AFAM387, ANTH267, AMST258
Prereq: None

LAST271 Political Economy of Developing Countries

This course explores the political economy of development, with a special focus on poverty reduction. We discuss the meaning of development, compare Latin American to East Asian development strategies (focusing on Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, and Taiwan), examine poverty-reduction initiatives in individual countries (including Bangladesh, Chile, and Tanzania), and evaluate approaches to famine prevention and relief. Throughout the course, we pay close attention to the role of procedural democracy, gender relations, market forces, and public action in promoting or inhibiting development.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-GOVT
Identical With: GOVT271, CEAS271
Prereq: None

LAST272 Cubanidad: Diaspora, Exiles, and Cultural Identity in Cuban Literature and Film

This course will examine shifting notions of Cubanness, or "cubanidad," from the 19th century to the present times from a diasporic framework. We will discuss writings by/about African slaves, Chinese indentured laborers and migrants, and Spanish immigrants in Cuba, as well as Cuban exiles in the U.S. and Spain from the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century. Through a variety of literary texts and films, we will then study select cases of European exiles who visited Cuba in the 1930s and '40s, the later massive waves of Cuban migration to the U.S. after the Revolution, and the more recent immigrants who have settled in Cuba.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN272
Prereq: None

LAST273 Beyond Machu Picchu & Macondo: Real and Imaginary Worlds in Latin American Letters

Latin American writers and intellectuals have long conceived of their particular literary and cultural practices in connection to individual spaces and sites, both real and imagined. In this course we will examine why and how they have done so, looking not only at well-known if not legendary ones such as Machu Picchu and Macondo, invented, respectively, by Neruda and García Márquez in certain moments of their careers, but also the América and Gran Colombia of Simón Bolívar, the New York City of the Cuban intellectual José Martí (1880s) and Nuyorican writer Tato Laviera (1970s), as well as Violeta Parra's other Chile, César Aira's Colón (Panamá), Fernando Vallejo's Medellín (Colombia), and Mayra Montero's eroticized Caribbean. In each case we will be concerned with understanding the relationship between local, national, and hemispheric history and the new imaginarios created by the author/intellectual in question in the context of north-south relations. Topics to be considered within this critical framework will include the Wars of Independence, industrialization in the late 19th-century, the construction of the Panama Canal (1904--1914), the Cold War (1947--1991), Latino identity in the context of Puerto Rico and New York City, the drug wars, and sexual identity. When possible, films and short videos will be used to help build knowledge of historical context.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN273
Prereq: None

LAST274 Insular Borders of Latin(x) America

Before and at the same time the United States established itself throughout the 19th century as a major power in the Americas and the world, various Latin American republics inherited and acted upon a similar imperialist agenda to expand their borders not only to neighboring territories but also across oceans. In this class, we will study and compare these imperialist gestures, among them the Spanish Empire's control of its remaining insular colonies in the 19th century (e.g., Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam) and the United States' successive claim to these very same islands. We will analyze literary works and films that interrogate these imperialist claims as well as the trajectories of islanders: for instance, the forced migration of the Rapanui (Easter Island people) in the second half of the 19th century (first as slaves to Peru and then to the town of Hanga Roa in Easter Island) and the island-to-island "intra-colonial" (Joanna Poblete) recruitment of Filipino and Puerto Rican laborers in sugar plantations in Hawai'i at the beginning of the 20th century. Some of the questions we will explore are: Why are islands so coveted by old and new empires? How have Rapanui, Filipino, and Puerto Rican migrants and their descendants resisted authorities on the insular borders of empire? How do writers and artists tell these silenced histories? Can we speak of Latinidad and Edouard Glissant's concept of Poetics of Relation in a Pacific Ocean context? Readings will be in Spanish and English. All discussions and assignments will be in Spanish.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: SPAN274, AMST289
Prereq: SPAN221

LAST276 Body, Voice, Text: Theater and the Transmission of Experience

Theater can and does exist as a written text, but we all know that its existence on the page is meant as a precursor to its live performance out in the world. In this course, our approach to a series of Latin American plays will be informed by competing notions of the theater as both a field of academic inquiry (built on reading, study, research, and interpretation) and also as an art form (built on reading, rehearsal, repetition, direction, and interpretation). We will combine traditional academic study of the written dramatic text with theater workshop exercises meant to train actors for the delivery of the staged performance text. Students will thus gain an understanding of how academic study and and workshop rehearsal take different approaches to what is essentially the same goal/problem: how to interpret the text written by the dramatist, whether for meaning or performance. This course will be taught in Spanish.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN276, THEA276
Prereq: None

LAST277 The Secret Life of Waste: Trash in Latin American Art & Literature

From space junk to microplastic particles found in human blood, man-made waste and pollution are ubiquitous. What are the effects of waste on the environment? What can the decomposition of waste create and/or undo? What is the afterlife of waste? Is waste apocalyptic? Through figures such as rottenness, radioactivity, mutation, and zombies, we will explore the ways in which Latin American art and literature try to answer some of these questions by imagining living amidst the remnants of hyperconsumption and by exploring the unforeseen effects that coexisting with waste could have upon the land and the body. We will study a wide range of visual and literary engagements with trash from novels, poetry, comics, and films to environmental art projects. Artists and writers may include Cecilia Vicuña, Daniel Lie, Samanta Schweblin, Fernanda Trías, Vik Muniz, H. G. Oesterheld, Javier Campos, and Alejandro Durán, among others.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN277
Prereq: SPAN221

LAST278 Narratives of the Latin American Jungle

This course is a critical exploration of the ways in which forests and its plurality of beings, and particularly the tropical territories marked as jungle or rainforest in South America (the Amazon, the Darien), have been narrated, imagined and contested in cultural production and in indigenous and peasant ontologies, place-based practices and resistance for more than a century. We will investigate the construction of jungle as a territory of dwelling shaped by the relational condition between human and other-than-human beings (plants, animals, water) and as a place where diverse anxieties about sovereignty, politics, race, development, gender, and subversion collide. We will examine this cultural geography in relation to diverse histories of modernization, development and extractivism, the global angst over the environment and its destruction, local processes of (cosmopolitical) resistance, and the various political and environmental conflicts that have shaped the region over the past century. Attending to Amazonian indigenous thought and to political ecology and other intellectual practices emerging from Latin America, as well as to literature, film, popular culture and visual art, we will discuss the potential to disavow modern/colonial binaries like nature-culture, human-nonhuman and civilization-barbarism, in a place that has been central to the way in which Latin America has been imagined for centuries.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN278
Prereq: None

LAST279 Christianity and Globalization

This course focuses on recent developments in global Christianity. We will look at various interlinked dynamics: the rise of spirit-filled Evangelicalism, especially Pentecostalism, faith-based humanitarianism, child-sponsorship programs, and themes of militarism such as spiritual warfare. We will pay attention to the role of U.S. power in the world and how the narratives that various Protestant Christians tell through their writings and media shape life across international spaces. We will sample a variety of methods in how one studies the field of Christianity. These will include historical, sociological, and anthropological methods, all of which challenge traditional scholarly accounts (meaning those in the field of church history) in order to expand our understandings of Christianity in the modern period.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI279, AMST299
Prereq: None

LAST280 Screening Youth in Contemporary Latin American Cinema

This course will examine some of the most important Latin American films to emerge in the past three decades that have cast children and teenagers as protagonists. We will analyze a large body of films that address issues of historical memory, economic inequality, social conflict, political activism, education, sexuality, cultural identity, and citizenship through the lens of the child or adolescent. These films question the roles of minors in relation to the political arena and reflect upon the constructions of childhood that operate at a social level with important political implications. Students will explore the aesthetic and social dynamics at play in the representation of young protagonists and develop interpretative filmic skills through an exploration of the connections between the technical composition of the works and the social, political, and cultural contexts that they address. Besides the varied cultural, theoretical, formal, and historical elements that this course will examine, one of the central components is a creative module in which students will develop an idea for a short film based on their own personal coming-of-age narrative.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN280
Prereq: SPAN221

LAST281 Labor in Latin America and the Caribbean: Pedestals and Veils of Disposability

This course examines the racialized and gendered exploitation of labor that has long structured everyday life across the Western hemisphere. It asks how shifting productions of race and gender mediate the distinction between productive and disposable humanity. We will examine a variety of materials from the region spanning the colonial period to the present, including literature, film, visual and performance art, economic theory, political philosophy, grassroots activism, testimonials, chronicles, and journalism. Through these texts, we will problematize a range of interdisciplinary issues, such as the veiled continuities of conquest and enslavement, the accelerated pace of capitalist extraction of human and non-human value, and state responses to forced migrations of populations considered criminal, undesirable, or superfluous. We will also study aesthetic and lived examples of resistance from Latin America, the Caribbean, and their diasporas, with particular interest in how collective organizing has taken on new forms in the face of work's increasing informalization and precaritization. Building off these examples, students will develop an accessible final project that applies their research and analytical skills not only to produce knowledge, but to cultivate critical consciousness for the reader, listener, or viewer.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN281
Prereq: SPAN221

LAST283 The Other 9/11: Dictatorial and Post-Dictatorial Films and Literature in Chile

This course explores how poetry, novels, and films, produced during and after Chile's military regime (junta de gobierno), try to make sense of state violence and cruelty. This class suggests that by actively performing the work of memory, of remembering the violent past and the forcefully disappeared ones (detenidos desaparecidos), films and literature oppose the politics of oblivion instantiated by the post-dictatorial state while claiming for and imagining social justice. We will understand films and literature as active, ethical memory technologies which we will read against the grain of Chilean politics and history (políticas de los acuerdos).



Some of the poets we will read include Eugenia Brito, Carmen Berenguer, Teresa Calderón, Malú Urriola, Rosa Betty Muñoz, and Raúl Zurita. In addition, we will watch films by Patricio Guzmán, Cecilia Vicuña, and Pablo Larraín. Finally, we will read novels by Alejandro Zambra, Roberto Bolaño, and Nona Fernández.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN283
Prereq: None

LAST285 Narratives of Crisis: Violence and Representation in Contemporary Latin American Culture

How have Latin American literature, film, and performance of the past three decades articulated the many forms of violence in a region facing complex armed conflicts, wars deployed around the drug trade, and diverse forms of political unrest? Focusing on Colombia, Peru, Central America, and Mexico, we will investigate how contemporary cultural artifacts reflect on the linguistic, ethical, and social dimensions of subjectivity in times of crisis and provide productive analytical frameworks to examine violence, history, and memory in the region.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN282
Prereq: None

LAST286 Racial Capitalism and Resistance in Central America

In modern-day Central America and its diasporas, the most precarious communities are descendants of colonized, enslaved, and dispossessed populations. Yet while the fact of race and class intersecting is evident, why and how they have evolved together is not. This course examines the relationship between race formation and economic dispossession across the region through a transnational perspective. Through a wide range of Central American and hemispheric cultural objects, theoretical frameworks, and grassroots praxes, we will meditate on the theoretical paradigm of racial capitalism, which holds that racialism and capitalism are co-constituting and have evolved together to produce an economic world order dependent on colonialism, violence, exploitation, and containment. Students will develop their interpretive and analytical skills by collaboratively examining issues of whiteness, mestizaje, and multiculturalism; resource extraction; economic exploitation and expulsion; rage, resistance, and revolution; policing, counterinsurgency, and criminality; migration; identity and ethno-politics; and education. Beyond these cultural, theoretical, historical, and aesthetic concerns, a central component of the course is a creative or community engaged project that students will develop in close collaboration and in stages throughout the semester.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN285
Prereq: SPAN221

LAST288 Territories of Dwelling, Desire and Resistance in Latin America

What does it mean to dwell in a place? How are spatial orders and more-than human dimensions conceived of and what is the symbolic and material weight of these conceptions? This course seeks to examine the ways in which diverse spaces categorized as rural or as "natural frontiers" in Latin America have been inhabited, negotiated, and contested in the 20th and 21st centuries. How have cultural practices constructed them as territories of dwelling, desire, possession, dispossession, and resistance? How does narrative and art reflect on local modes of dwelling and on the relationships between community, embodiment, desire, memory and the materiality of place? We will focus on texts and artistic practices--literature, film, performance, and the visual arts--that, in thinking about mountains, rivers and other bodies of water, plants, more-than-human beings, seek to destabilize the hegemonic (colonial) gaze that has been projected onto rural spaces for centuries and complicate extractivist and other capitalist logics that have sought to transform them. We will trace how these texts intervene in urgent debates about extractivism, the destiny of rural lands, the uses, abuses and rights of nature, the struggles for peasant and indigenous rights, environmental justice, and the defense of alternative ontologies. We will focus particularly on the Andean and Amazon regions of South America, with specific attention to Colombia and Perú.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN288
Prereq: None

LAST289 The Abya Yala Connection: Latin American Ecological Literature and Art

This course will examine the role that literature and the visual arts have played in imagining and suggesting ecological relations between humans and more-than-humans during our ecological crisis. Through the analysis of literary and visual aesthetic strategies, we will identify forms of resistance, endurance, and solidarity between feminist, queer, and indigenous bodies and the planet.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN292
Prereq: None

LAST290 Current Environmental Issues in Latin America (CLAC 1.0)

(English translation below Spanish text) Este curso proporcionará información histórica y actual sobre el desarrollo de temas ambientales en América Latina. La información se dividirá en la evaluación del uso del medio ambiente durante los períodos precolombino y colonial (a); y b) período moderno. Se discutirá la organización, estructura y gobernanza del medio ambiente. El desarrollo de políticas públicas, planes de gestión, factores que se deterioran y los posibles usos sostenibles del medio ambiente y sus recursos. Leeremos literatura interdisciplinaria incluyendo: académica, informes, documentos oficiales gubernamentales y proyectos de ONG dedicados al diagnóstico, desarrollo y uso o nuestros recursos en América Latina. Por último, se estudiarán casos particulares de países latinoamericanos como Argentina, Brasil, México, Costa Rica, Perú y Venezuela. El curso se presenta en un formato de lectura/discusión en el que todas las lecturas, escritos y discusiones estarán en español. This course will provide historical and current information on the development of environmental issues in Latin America. The information will be divided into assessing the use of the environment during (a) pre-Columbian and colonial periods and (b) the modern period. The organization, structure, and governance of the environment will be discussed, as will the development of public policies, management plans, factors that deteriorate, and the potential sustainable uses of the environment and its resources. We will be reading interdisciplinary literature including academic, reports, official governmental documents, and NGOs' projects dedicated to the diagnostic, development, and use of resources in Latin America. Finally, particular cases of Latin American countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Costa Rica, Peru, and Venezuela will be studied. The course is presented in a reading/discussion format in which all readings, writings, and discussions will be in Spanish.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: NSM-ENVS
Identical With: ENVS294, CGST267
Prereq: SPAN221

LAST291 From the Muralists to the Narconovela: The Public Intellectual in Mexico

Mexican writers, intellectuals, and artists, both male and female, have long been recognized for the brilliance with which they have used their work to comment on and shape the direction of the Mexican state and to engage with the multiple traditions (indigenous, European, and mestizo) that define them. In this course, we will examine the writings and artistic and filmic work of several major figures with the goal of understanding how they see and imagine Mexico in particular historical moments. The course will cover the entirety of the 20th-century and the beginning of the 21st, extending from the Mexican Revolution (1910--1917) and the Muralists (1920s--40s), through the post-1945 period including 1968, and to the drug wars and the Zapatista movement (since 1994). Students will analyze novels, essays, art, poetry, and film.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN290
Prereq: SPAN221

LAST292 Spanish American 'Modernismo' in a Global Context

The publication of Nicaraguan Rubén Darío's AZUL... in 1888 is often considered to be the inaugural event of "modernismo," the first Spanish-language literary movement that originated in Spanish America and spread thereafter throughout the Hispanophone world. In March 1916, about a month after Darío's death, a magazine in the Philippines claimed that Darío also belonged--at least "spiritually"--to the Philippines. Inspired by this statement, in this course students will read poems, short stories, and crónicas (short journalistic articles) by canonical Spanish American modernista writers, such as Darío, Julián del Casal, José Martí, Amado Nervo, José Enrique Rodó, Leopoldo Lugones, and Delmira Agustini, in conjunction with Filipino modernistas, including Fernando María Guerrero, Jesús Balmori, Manuel Bernabé, and Evangelina Guerrero. We will also read a selection of works of Spanish writers, such as Salvador Rueda, who visited Cuba and the Philippines in the 1910s. Some of the salient characteristics of modernismo that we will cover are the rejection of immediate reality and materialism, the search for linguistic renovation and cosmic harmony, and the celebration of Hispanism. When focusing on this last aspect, we will assess how modernismo helped to keep Spanish America connected not only to Spain but also to the Philippines, which became a U.S. territory in 1898, alongside Cuba and Puerto Rico. Thus, we will explore to what extent modernista writers responded to the spread of U.S. imperialism.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN291
Prereq: None

LAST293 Writing Women's Bodies: Gender and Sexuality in Latin America

This class explores the narrative fiction of 21st century Latin American women. Through an analysis of visuality, art, ecology, nanotechnology, sexuality, and memory, among other themes, we study the ways in which women construct their bodily experience and forge ethical relations with the world through linguistic and aesthetic innovation. We will read authors such as Samanta Schweblin, Gabriela Wiener, Brenda Navarro, María Gaínza, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Juliana Javierre, and Lina Meruane.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN293, FGSS291
Prereq: SPAN221

LAST294 Queering Latin America: Contemporary Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Literature and Film

This course studies important and groundbreaking films, novels, and poetry by contemporary gay, lesbian, and transgender artists. It focuses on their strategies to survive, respond to, and defy the changing socio-political Latin American landscape of the last 80 years. We will introduce some key critical concepts and debates from queer theory to guide our discussions. Some of the artists we will study include: Alejandra Pizarnik, Lucía Puenzo, Manuel Puig, Pedro Lemembel, Karim Aïnouz, Lorenzo Vigas, Rosamaría Roffiel, and Norma Mosgrovejo, among others.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN294, FGSS294
Prereq: None

LAST295 Voices, Noises, and Son: Modern Sounds in Hispanic Caribbean Cultures

What happens to our understanding of Hispanic Caribbean cultures if we think about it through the category of sound? From the recorded voices of indigenous Caribbean peoples denouncing the atrocities of neo-colonialism to the contemporary Afro-Caribbean reggaeton rhythms in San Juan, sound has been a key component for this region's expressions and literatures. In this course, students will explore how multiple kinds of sound-voices, noises, music, and rhythms-shape and define the literatures and cultures of the Caribbean basin. We will read literary works and pay attention to the "sounds" described in them in order to examine how diverse ethnic groups have contributed to the production, perception, and transformation of various Caribbean "sonorous" landscapes.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN295
Prereq: SPAN221

LAST296 Colonial Latin America

This course studies the history of Latin America and the Caribbean from pre-conquest times to the emergence of independence movements in the early 19th century. Lectures will explore the key environmental, cultural, economic, political, and religious transformations that shaped colonial societies throughout the region. Beginning with the formation of indigenous and Iberian polities before 1492, we will consider how early modern colonial governance functioned and evolved throughout the period of Spanish and Portuguese rule in the Americas. Through an array of primary and secondary sources we will reconstruct the lived experiences of a diversity of actors across the colonial world. We will pay particular attention to the methods and approaches that scholars have used to understand the history of the region.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST296
Prereq: None

LAST297 "Un pedacito de la historia negra": Afro-Latin American Literature and Culture

The significant contributions of Afro-descendent individuals to the development of Latin American culture have been frequently overlooked or torn to pieces. Yet, the experiences and bodies of racialized people have been key in shaping and transforming the region's culture. Beyond their representation in early colonial and republican works, Afro-descendent writers and characters have been crucial in the modern aesthetics of Latin American literatures. Along with musicians and other artists, they have provided a continuous challenge to the idea of Latin America and its cultural production as a product of a homogeneous cultural and racial miscegenation. Inspired by Colombian artist Joe Arroyo's opening to a famous salsa song, wherein he sets out to tell "un pedacito de la historia negra," in this seminar we will study short stories, novels, poetry, music, and film, including works that explore the experience of being racialized in Latin America, poetic experimentalism through orality, and the retelling of the history of Black resistance in the Caribbean through modern media. Engaging with historical and contemporary issues such as racial discrimination, social inequality, and cultural pride and preservation, this course invites students to critically analyze the fundamental role of Afro-Latin Americans in shaping Latin American cultures and histories.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-LAST
Identical With: SPAN298
Prereq: SPAN221

LAST298 Food Security and Environmental Conservation (CLAC 1.0)

(English translation below Spanish text) En este curso los estudiantes investigarán información y discusión sobre la seguridad alimentaria y el uso del medio ambiente en una selección de países de América Latina. Haremos preguntas sobre la base de la producción y disponibilidad de alimentos. También examinaremos la información disponible de las agencias públicas y privadas sobre los programas establecidos por los países para garantizar la seguridad alimentaria de sus habitantes y el uso sostenible y la conservación del medio ambiente. Discutiremos conceptos como: La soberanía alimentaria y la seguridad como un sistema alimentario en el que las personas que producen, distribuyen y consumen alimentos también controlan los mecanismos y políticas de producción y distribución de alimentos; La nutrición como normas mundiales y particulares de consumo de alimentos; La Justicia social relacionada con la accesibilidad de los alimentos; y el derecho humano a una alimentación adecuada y a la libertad del hambre como uno de los objetivos del milenio de las Naciones Unidas. El estudiante revisará casos particulares en América Latina. El curso se presenta en un formato de lectura/discusión en el que todas las lecturas, escritos y discusiones estarán en español. In this course students will research and discuss food security and the use of the environment in a selection of Latin American countries. We will ask questions about the basis of food production and availability. We will also examine the available information from public and private agencies about programs established by countries to ensure the food security of their inhabitants and the sustainable use and conservation of the environment. We will discuss concepts such as: food sovereignty and security as a food system in which the people who produce, distribute, and consume food also control the mechanisms and policies of food production and distribution; nutrition as a global and particular standard of food consumption; social justice related to the accessibility of food; and the human right to adequate food and freedom from hunger as one of the United Nations' objectives of the millennium. Students will look at particular cases in Latin America. The course is presented in a reading/discussion format in which all readings, writings, and discussions will be in Spanish.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: NSM-ENVS
Identical With: ENVS297, CGST268
Prereq: SPAN221

LAST299 Decolonizing Speculative Fiction in Latin America

This course interrogates what it means to imagine alternative futures in colonial and postcolonial settings. As the writings of conquistadors, explorers and missionaries show, Europe envisioned the New Continent as the land of the future or utopia, to the point that contemporary decolonial theorists have observed that nothing was "discovered" by the first European travelers to America but the idea of discovery itself. Modern temporalities of progress became thus inseparable from the image of the Americas as a frontier of imperial expansion, religious conversion, and economic exploitation. If European SF (science fiction/speculative fiction) emerged hand-in-hand with positivist notions of progress and civilization, Latin American SF contested Eurocentric epistemologies by claiming the ability to imagining the future and fictionalizing worlds otherwise. The course will center on three key moments of Latin American literary history: 1) the early to mid-twentieth century experiments in fantastic literature from the Southern Cone, which broke with realist mimesis from the margins of modernity; 2) post-1989 SF novels from Bolivia, Guatemala and Chile, that address the making of neoliberal globalization from the vantage point of the Global South; and 3) contemporary Dominican and Cuban works in which Afro-Caribbean religions and gender formations engage in productive conversations with digital technologies, biomedical engineering, game cultures, and climate change.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN299
Prereq: None

LAST302 Latin American Politics

This course explores democracy, development, and revolution in Latin America, with special attention to Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Nicaragua. Questions to be addressed include: why has Argentina lurched periodically from free-wheeling democracy to murderous military rule? Why is authoritarianism usually less harsh, but democracy often more shallow, in Brazil than in Argentina? How democratic are Latin America's contemporary democracies? What accounts for the success or failure of attempted social revolutions in Latin America? Why did postrevolutionary Cuba wind up with a more centrally planned economy and a more authoritarian political system than postrevolutionary Nicaragua? How much progress has each of these countries made toward creating a more affluent, educated, healthy, and equitable society?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-GOVT
Identical With: GOVT302
Prereq: None

LAST307 Contemporary Challenges in Latin American Politics

Latin America's contemporary challenges include corruption, crime, economic woes, social policy shortcomings, populism, declining political trust, the erosion of fragile democracies, and the political underrepresentation of women and minority groups. This course examines the historical legacies, international influences, and social-structural factors that shape and constrain how Latin American citizens and governments are responding to these challenges. Weekly readings and discussions, along with a succession of analytic exercises, will prepare students to write a research paper on a Latin American politics topic of their choice.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-GOVT
Identical With: GOVT309
Prereq: None

LAST308 Greater Latin America: Ideas, Politics, and Culture in the Americas

What is "Latin America," who are "Latin Americans" and what is the relationship among and between places and people of the region we call Latin America, on the one hand, and the greater Latin diaspora in the US on the other? This course will explore the history of Latin America as an idea, and the cultural, social, political, and economic connections among peoples on both sides of the southern and eastern borders of the United States. The course will draw from a variety of sources, including literature, visual arts, music, and oral history. Topics we will consider include the origin of the concept of "Latin" America, Inter-Americanism and Pan-Americanism, transnational social movements and intellectual exchanges, migration, and identity politics.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-LAST
Prereq: None

LAST309 Territory, Community, and Identity in the Americas

How does a place shape community social relations? And in what ways do peoples' relationships to natural resources and the built environment shape their political identities? This course will explore these questions by focusing on particular case studies in the Western Hemisphere. We will consider the ways in which communities are tethered to a particular idea of territory, whether they be "fugitives," "runaways," "natives," or "immigrants." The cases we will explore include quilombos and palenques comprised of people who escaped enslavement in Portuguese and Spanish America, indigenous communities forged before, during, and after colonization by Europeans, and newfound communities or colonies comprised of relatively recent (im)migrants.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-LAST
Prereq: None

LAST315 Cuban Literature and Film: Imagination, Revolt, and Melancholia

This course surveys the major aesthetic and socio-historical movements in modern and contemporary Cuba. Since the late 19th century, the island of Cuba has been at the center of a number of key epochal disputes: between colonialism and independence, racism and racial justice, neocolonialism and revolution, liberalism and socialism, isolationism and globalization. In the arts, the turn of the century launched a period of great imaginative invention. Considering the singular place of Cuba in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the globe, this course addresses some of the most representative works of Cuban literature and film since independence until the present time. Imagination, revolt, and melancholia are the three concepts that will orient our discussion. Imagination refers both to artistic creation and to the collective capacity of projecting new worlds, utopias, or impossible realities. Revolt, as opposed to revolution, is not restrained to politics as usual but relates rather to a deep experience of discontent and a return (from the Latin revolvere) to ancient psycho-social strata. Finally, melancholia serves as a point of view to understand what happens when history does not live up to emancipatory expectations. Special attention will be given to Afrocubanismo, ethnographic literature, the avant-garde aesthetics of the group Orígenes, Marvelous Realism, testimony, revolution, socialist experimental film, diaspora, the Special Period, and post-Soviet life.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: SPAN296, CGST324, COL314
Prereq: SPAN221

LAST320 Media and Power in Latin America: From Quipus to Twitter

This interdisciplinary seminar explores how media technologies have shaped Latin American societies and politics from the colonial encounter to the dawn of the digital age. Investigating the local histories of indigenous forms such as the Andean knotted quipu and scribal texts, along with newspapers, radio, photography and social media, we examine how Latin Americans made and used these technologies to assert power, claim status, and launch protests. Through brief theoretical readings and historical case studies, we explore such themes as the relationship between colonialism and the written word, the enduring legacy of alternative indigenous literacies, the importance of rumor and oral communication in societies with low literacy rates, and the role of mass media in identity formation and contemporary social movements.



Structured in part as a lab, the class will be organized around producing a physical and digital exhibition of Latin American media materials available in Wesleyan's collections, to be displayed for the broader university community and beyond. We will produce this exhibition over the course of the semester, integrating individual research projects into our broader collective project that will be conducted as a collaborative/team effort. Along the way we will experiment with hands-on activities that might include making quill pens, setting type, and operating a printing press, take field trips to examine rare media materials first hand, and learn from on-campus experts as we develop our public exhibition.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST321
Prereq: None

LAST321 Secrets, Lies, and Fictions in the Americas

In 1964, historian Richard Hofstadter underlined the spread of a "paranoid style" in American politics. Although Hofstadter's description seems more appropriate today than ever, in an increasingly interconnected global order the role of misinformation, uncertainty, manipulation, and conspiratorial imaginaries in shaping and limiting democracies and public spheres cannot be exclusively assigned to any particular locale. From a continental standpoint, this course offers analytical tools to explore the political complexity of lies, secrets, and fictions in both the United States and Latin America since the mid-twentieth century to this day. By studying a series of cases--including the Guatemalan civil war, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. intervention in the Middle East, the "dirty war" in Latin America, censorship in socialist Cuba, the arrest of Augusto Pinochet in London, Wikileaks, hacker practices in the early days of internet, or Cambridge Analytica--we will address the relations between surveillance, spectacle, and conspiracies (both factual and imagined) in the contemporary techno-political landscape. Moreover, the course emphasizes the speculative and theoretical potentials of art and literature when it comes to understanding socio-political phenomena. Beyond distinctions between truth and falsehood, fictional constructions are key to our collective capacity to imagine alternative worlds. By mapping out the ways in which fictions circulate as such or rather as truthful versions of reality, we will problematize the limits and uses of truth, lies, and official and alternative narratives, as well as the power of states, corporations, individuals, and collectives to direct attention and frame information.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM321, AMST222
Prereq: None

LAST322 Exploration, Conquest, and Insurrection: The History of the Amazon 1542 to Present

Dark, wild, primitive, Edenic and infinitely wealthy: the Amazon has been many things in many times and places. From the disgruntled Spanish conquistadors who first traversed the jungle's rivers in search of cinnamon, to the 19th-century scientific expeditions of enlightened explorers, to contemporary environmentalists, the Amazon remains a mysterious object of inquiry. It still incites the imagination of travelers, filmmakers, and politicians alike. This seminar investigates the multiple ways in which the Amazon and its peoples have been portrayed in chronicles, scientific writings, and film. We will confront the historical circumstances, motives and ideologies that prompted each of these depictions and how, in turn, they shaped the colonization of the region. We will pay close attention to genre, and to themes such as cross-cultural encounter, imperialism, and the representation of indigenous societies. We begin in 1542 with the chronicle of Francisco de Orellana. As the first Spaniard to navigate the entire length of the Amazon River, Orellana influenced how Europeans imagined the jungle well into the 19th century. Subsequently, we apply readings in history of science and anthropological theory to Claude Lévi-Strauss account of Amazonian tribes in Tristes Tropiques (1955). Students will then conduct independent research into a representation of their interest. Possible topics include scientific expeditions in the region, the jungle and modernization, global warming, or human rights. Finally, we will reflect on the Amazon as a metaphor for the human condition with Werner Herzog's film Fitzcarraldo (1982).
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST322
Prereq: None

LAST335 Nature, Science, and Empire in Early Latin America

This seminar will introduce students to a diversity of scientific practices that flourished in the Hispanic World between 1400 and 1800. We will begin by analyzing how a debate known as the "polemic of Spanish Science," together with the Black Legend conditioned the ways in which colonial Latin American science was traditionally approached. From available studies we will then survey some of the significant contributions to botany, astronomy, medicine, and metallurgy of Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations. From there we will read an array of primary and secondary sources in order to reconstruct the varied, and often eclectic knowledge gathering and knowledge making practices that missionaries, humanists, and crown-officials devised to understand the natural world. We will pay close attention to their particular goals and methods and the manner in which they were influenced by the encounter with foreign peoples, the dynamics of conquest and colonization, the movement of books and commodities, and institutions of censorship and patronage.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST335
Prereq: None

LAST343 Empires of Captivity: The Resurgence of Atlantic Slavery in the Age of Emancipations

The dawn of the 19th century was marked by a series of challenges to Atlantic slavery, epitomized first by the unprecedented victories of the Haitian Revolution and then by the implementation of municipal bans and bilateral treaties that sought to limit the international trade in African captives. Yet seemingly paradoxically, this same period saw the rapid expansion of new zones of enslavement stretching from the U.S. South to Cuba, Brazil, and beyond. Proslavery forces mobilized across these jurisdictions in order to reverse the tide of abolition and to participate in (or simply to profit from) a burgeoning illegal trade in captives. Meanwhile, people of African descent who were enslaved or re-enslaved during this period built upon the precedent of emancipation in Haiti and other antislavery jurisdictions as they mounted claims to freedom for themselves, their families, and their communities. They continuously pushed forward the halting pace of general emancipation, laying the foundations for struggles for recognition and restitution that continue to the present day.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-LAST, SBS-LAST
Identical With: AFAM343
Prereq: None

LAST344 The Haitian Revolution Beyond Borders

In 1791, enslaved people rose up against their masters in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, at the time the most profitable plantation society in the world. Thirteen years later, their efforts would culminate in the declaration of independence of Haiti, a nation founded on the pillars of antislavery, anticolonialism, and racial equality. This course investigates the regional and global significance of this revolution through its interconnections with Haiti's neighbors in the Caribbean and across Latin America. First, we will look at the immediate implications of Haiti's founding for the fate of New World slavery during the Age of Revolutions. Next, we will consider Haiti's long-term impact on national identities, racial formations, and future revolutionary struggles in the Americas over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-LAST
Identical With: AFAM344
Prereq: None

LAST348 Urban Histories of Latin America

Cities have occupied Latin American writers, artists, and scholars since the early decades of the sixteenth century. Mapped on to preexisting settlements of indigenous importance, colonial cities became the center of Iberian administration in the New World. They imparted justice, granted citizenship rights, set the standard of civility and religious orthodoxy, and held the promise of economic improvement. The preeminence of cities in Latin America continued into the modern period. Mexico, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro became opulent and unequal metropolitan centers in the nineteenth century. Unconstrained growth brought about the megalopolises of our current day.



This seminar will explore Latin America's major urban centers in significant moments from the pre-Hispanic period until the present day. Through chronicles, travel narratives, photography, legal writings, newspaper archives, maps, and film we will reconstruct the many dimensions of urban culture in the region. The course will be organized thematically and geographically. We will begin by studying the ways in which Latin American writers have understood the role of the city, and its dwellers, in shaping the trajectory of their various nations. We will pay particular attention to themes like the city and modernity, the every-day experiences of urban residents, racial, gender, and social inequality, the city as a site of historical memory and violent contestation, the environmental challenges of urban growth, and the rise and fall of counter-cultural and protest movements.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST348
Prereq: None

LAST373 Language and Power in Latin America

What is a perfect language? Societies across the globe, in different times and places, have sought to answer this question. In the process they have posited a diversity of theories about the relationships among language, individual and group identity, social harmony, religious devotion, and political power. This seminar investigates the ways in which Latin American societies, from the colonial period until the present, grappled with the problem of language and its ability to shape their communities. From Indigenous polities, to the imperial monarchies that conquered and colonized the Americas, to the nation-states that emerged in the 19th century, all have had to confront the realities of a diverse and profoundly multilingual region. The course will be organized around representative case studies. It will draw from a variety of fields (e.g., linguistics, philosophy, history, anthropology, and history of science) to consider how language served as either a resource or an obstacle to be surmounted in the creation of ideal religious, political, and intellectual communities in Latin America. Significant themes include the role of language in conquest and colonization, the development of cultural institutions to regulate and standardize language usage, the prevalence of bilingualism in many regions, the proliferation of literacy campaigns as a hallmark of the revolutionary governments of the mid-20th century, and the emergence of Indigenous peoples as social and political actors in contemporary Latin America.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST373
Prereq: None

LAST382 Erosion of Democracy

This seminar will explore the characteristics, causes, and consequences of "democratic backsliding" -- deterioration in the quality of democracy that may or may not lead to democratic breakdown. Topics to be covered include the meaning of democracy, the measurement of democracy, the right to vote, electoral integrity, democracy and the rule of law, democracy and populism, democracy and the Covid-19 pandemic, dimensions and sequences of democratic erosion, the causes of democratic erosion, and resistance to democratic erosion.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-GOVT
Identical With: GOVT382
Prereq: None

LAST383 Venezuela: The Effect of Oil Discovery on People, the Environment, and on Democracy (CLAC 1.0)

(English translation follows below) Este curso examinará los factores clave que han afectado el desarrollo de Venezuela y su entorno desde el período precolonial hasta el presente. Dividiremos la historia de Venezuela en dos períodos críticos: antes y después del descubrimiento de petróleo. Haremos preguntas sobre la naturaleza y las interacciones de los factores y agentes clave que transformaron a Venezuela de una colonia a la de un país económicamente independiente. Al examinar los períodos económicos anteriores y posteriores al petróleo por separado, aprenderemos que los factores clave, como la agricultura, el uso de la tierra y la influencia colonial europea, cambiaron drásticamente, transformando así muchas instituciones sociopolíticas. Los contrastes incluirán la resiliencia y la erradicación de enfermedades, los derechos humanos y la esclavitud, la propiedad de la tierra, la salud humana, los impactos en la biodiversidad y la salud humana, y la protección de las culturas indígenas. En última instancia, examinaremos los factores que han llevado al colapso de la democracia. Leeremos una literatura interdisciplinaria que incluye antropología, religión, sociología, ciencias ambientales, derecho e historia. El curso se presenta en un formato de lectura / discusión en el que todas las lecturas, escritos y discusiones serán en español. This course will examine the key factors that have affected the development of Venezuela and its environment from the pre-colonial period to the present. We will divide the history of Venezuela into two critical periods: before and after the discovery of oil. We will ask questions about the nature and interactions of the key factors and agents that transformed Venezuela from a colony to that of an economically independent country. By examining the pre- and post-oil economic periods separately, we will learn that the key factors, such as agriculture, land use, and European colonial influence, changed dramatically, thereby transforming many sociopolitical institutions. The contrasts will include resilience to and eradication of diseases, human rights and slavery, land ownership, human health, impacts on biodiversity and human health, and protections of indigenous cultures. Ultimately we will examine the factors that have led to the collapse of democracy. We will read an interdisciplinary literature that includes anthropology, religion, sociology, environmental sciences, law, and history. The course is presented in a reading/discussion format in which all readings, writings, and discussions will be in Spanish.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ENVS
Identical With: ENVS283, CGST283
Prereq: SPAN221

LAST401 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

LAST402 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

LAST403 Department/Program Project or Essay

Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

LAST404 Department/Program Project or Essay

Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

LAST407 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

LAST408 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

LAST409 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

LAST410 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

LAST411 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

LAST412 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

LAST420 Student Forum

Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

LAST466 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

LAST491 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

LAST492 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT