global south cinema
Undergraduate / film Studies
Why has film often been considered the total work of art? What are the critical affordances of film and film theory? What are the production techniques and representational strategies that set film apart from other cultural forms? How has film intersected with projects of nation-building and national identity across the Global South?
Art and Revolution in Latin America
Undergraduate / Latin American Studies
How has cultural production animated the Latin American revolutionary imagination? How have art, literature, and film accompanied radical processes of social transformation and helped expand the horizons of utopianism in Latin America? How does art help us conceive, model, and build something different than what already exists?
Methods of Literary Criticism
Graduate / Literary Theory
This course offers an introduction to modern and contemporary literary theory. We will revisit foundational texts and study some of their critical appraisals to evaluate theory’s continued relevance for the assessment and interpretation of literary/artistic works. What does it mean to read a text as literature? What is the relation between the history of literary forms and the history of capitalism? How do cultural artifacts register the social, economic, and political forces that shape our world? What is the role of theory and criticism today?
Art, Politics, and Everyday Life in Mexico
Undergraduate / Mexican Studies
In this course, we will study how cultural representations mobilize the unremarkable status of the everyday. We will examine art’s capacity to reformulate the quotidian as something made, socially constructed and, ultimately, open to collective transformation. Focusing on different media such as film, photography, music, literature, and architecture, we will study the transformations of everyday life in Mexico from the mid-twentieth century to the present
Onda & Crack: The Mexican Novel in Transition
Graduate / Mexican Studies
Focusing on two corpora of contemporary Mexican literature, Onda and Crack, we will examine the capabilities of the novel form to periodize transition, crisis, unevenness, scarcity, and adjustment. We will consider how, in the aftermath of 1968, Onda and Crack novels offer two different formal solutions to the problem posed by the foreclosure of national development and the advent of globalization.
Latin America: Culture and Society
Undergraduate / Latin American Studies
This course offers an overview of Latin America’s cultural history from the colonial period to the contemporary era. Interdisciplinary in methods and scope, this course incorporates Latin American studies and literary and cultural theory to approach some of the key socioeconomic processes that have shaped the past and present of Latin American societies.
Form, Space, and the Mexican Novel
Graduate / Mexican Studies
In this seminar we will study the Mexican novel through the analytical convergence of literary formalism, aesthetic theory, and geocriticism. We will consider how the spatial imagination of the Mexican novel bespeaks the changing motions of sociality from the 1960s to the present. From style, composition, and plot to cognitive mapping, uneven development, and world-systems theory, we ask what the formal and spatial aggregations of the novel allow us to conceptualize about Mexico’s socioeconomic displacements in an era marked by privatization, financialization, international forced migration, and ecological devastation.