Course description: A contextual approach to the national cinemas of Latin America. Students will develop their skill in film analysis as they examine the specific role of film in re-focusing the terms of ongoing debates on questions of national identity and the function of culture in society.

Film viewing and discussions will be organized around four overlapping themes--Mapping Urban Realities; Road Movies; Street Kids; and Violence andRevolution: A View from Childhood—intended to provide insight into the role of Latin American fiction and documentary cinema in exploring the diverse geographies, societies and histories of the Latin American continent. We will also devote special attention to the analysis of various manifestations of social, cultural and economic conflict while revealing the roots of pervasive structural and institutional inequities in 20^th and 21^st century Latin America.

This seminar will focus on the creation of literature, visual art, performance, and music within contemporary Caribbean culture. We will examine aesthetic and critical responses to the current social, ecological, and political challenges facing the region, as well as the historical construction of the Caribbean as a zone of "hospitality”. Instead of following a strict chronological order or providing discrete accounts of national traditions, we will organize the texts around common historical and aesthetic themes to explore art's relationship to mourning, debt, political unrest, the pandemic, state violence, colonialism, ecological disasters, and tourism economies in the region.

While concentrating on the artistic production of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, we will reference dialogues with Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean texts, shedding light on key continuities and divergences constitutive of this corpus. We will also address gender politics, racial politics, gay/queer sexual politics, colonialism, political oppression, and their relation to aesthetics. Significant historical events such as Hurricanes Irma and María, Puerto Rico's Summer of 2019, Cuba's Movimiento San Isidro, Puerto Rico's Act 60, and the Dominican Republic's abortion ban will be considered in mapping artistic production.

Authors will include Achy Obejas, Allora & Calzadilla, Glorimar Marrero, Macha Colón, Johan Mijail, Yara Liceaga, Rita Indiana, Mara Pastor, Pedro Cabiya, Roque Salas, Yoss, Juan Carlos Quiñones, Jamaica Kincaid, Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, and Jorge Enrique Lage, along with critical essays by Mimi Sheller, Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter, Édouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, Audre Lorde, and others.

HIS 379: Rebels & Revolutionaries: Latin America in the 1960s

GLO, SBS+, Professor Eric Zolov, Mondays/Wednesdays, 3:30-450pm. Frey Hall 105

This course explores the intertwined relationship between “rebels and revolutionaries”cembodied in the figure of Ernesto “Che” Guevara in Latin America during the Global 1960s. With his long hair, irreverence toward authority, and militancy, Guevara became a symbol of countercultural rebellion as well as social revolution. Through a close reading of primary sources, the class will focus on different concepts of “rebellion,” “liberation,” and “revolution,” set against the backdrop of guerrilla insurgency, military repression, student protest, and U.S. interventionism. Students will write three critical analysis papers that draw directly on materials from class. There are no midterms or final exams.