Latin American & Caribbean Studies

LACS 35501 - New Directions In Afro-Latin Performance (Danielle Roper)
This class engages contemporary conversations in the study of Afro-Latin performance and explores the work of emerging black performance artists across the hemisphere. Tracing performances of blackness from the Southern cone to the Caribbean, we will examine the ways blackness is wielded by the State and by black communities themselves in performance and visual art across the region. We ask: what is the relationship between race and theatricality? What work is blackness made to do in states organized around discourses of racial democracy and mestizaje? How are notions of diaspora constructed through performances of blackness? We take up these questions in our study of reggaetón, hip hop, samba, el baile de los negritos and examine the works of noted and upcoming black artists such as Victoria and Nicomedes Santa-Cruz, Carlos Martiel, Las Nietas de Nonó, and others.

LACS 36382 - Development and Environment in Latin America (Diana Schwartz Francisco)
This course will consider the relationship between development and the environment in Latin America and the Caribbean. We will consider the social, political, and economic effects of natural resource extraction, the quest to improve places and peoples, and attendant ecological transformations, from the onset of European colonialism in the fifteenth century, to state- and private-led improvement policies in the twentieth. Some questions we will consider are: How have policies affected the sustainability of land use in the last five centuries? In what ways has the modern impetus for development, beginning in the nineteenth century and reaching its current intensity in the mid-twentieth, shifted ideas and practices of sustainability in both environmental and social terms? And, more broadly, to what extent does the notion of development help us explain the historical relationship between humans and the environment?

LACS 36411 - Literature and History in the Ibero and Ibero-American World (Mauricio Tenorio)
The course will explores the relations between literature writing (novels, short stories, poetry, essays) and history writing in the Ibero and Ibero-American world, from the 1800s to the 1970s. The focus will be on Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Mexico, Rio de la Plata, and Cuba. The course will deal with historical prose in its own language broth and with literature both as form of and evidence for history.

Visit CLAS’s course page for an extended listing of classes and descriptions.