Fall 2021

Day/Time: Monday, 6 – 8pm 

Instructors: Jordana Mendelson / Sara Nadal-Melsió

Instruction Mode: In Person

Description: This seminar will explore the role of writing in the creation and practices of contemporary art. We will focus on works from the 19th century through the 21st century, from Baudelaire's definition of the modern artist to the use of writing and all sorts of inscriptions by visual artists. We will examine writing as a technology that defines, produces, and intervenes in artistic practices (art criticism, essays, titles, press releases, museum catalogs, etc.) We will look at texts by critics and essayists and by artists themselves, as well as at the uncertain relationship between the two. The seminar will be taught in English, but the languages of the texts will be in both English and Spanish. Among the authors and artists we will consider are: José Ortega y Gasset, Eugeni d’Ors, José Díaz Fernández, Sebastià Gasch, Remedios Vario, Maruja Mallo, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Rubert de Ventós, Enrique Vila-Matas, Josep Renau, Antoni Tàpies, Antonio Saura, Ángel Gónzalez, Esther Ferrer, Estrella de Diego, Albert Serra, Chus Martínez, Xavier Antich, and Marina Garcés.

(This course originates in Comparative Literature)

Day/Time: Friday, 11am - 1:45pm

Instructor: Ana Dopico

Instruction Mode: In Person

Description: Inspired by the work of poets, writers, theorists, philosophers, and artists from the Caribbean and the U.S. South, this seminar lives in the figural eye of hurricanes, in a space of thought that probes the aesthetics, poetics, politics and radical invention that emerge from  traumatic environmental memory and climate catastrophe.  We will consider the historical, environmental, cultural and political impact of major hurricanes in the Caribbean and the U.S. South. We will trace "hurricane generations" in cultural production: how Hurricane Abby, Andrew, Katrina, and María and others created maelstrom of danger, destruction, and generative power in culture. We will map the geopolitics of hurricanes, and consider the tension between the aesthetics, the empirical, and the everyday imaginaries of hurricanes. We will take up vanguard movements and interdisciplinary crossings between poetics, prose, anthropology, art, and cultural theory. We will move from Fernando Ortiz's signal El Huracán to Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, to Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, Guillén, Franketienne, Dionne Brand, Edouard Glissant, Sylvia Winter, and others who write hurricane poetics and hurricane philosophy We will consider the genealogy of the hurricane in painting and the arts, from Winslow Homer's Hurricane in the Bahamas to the realm of environmental art like Teresita Fernández's work in Maelstrom. We will consider a range of work  from Cuban, Dominican, Haitian and Puerto Rican and U.S. arts and culture emerging from hurricanes through art, literature and film.

Day/Time: Thursday, 6:15 – 8:15pm

Instructor: Eduardo Subirats

Instruction Mode: In Person

Description: Este seminario gira en torno a la interacción de El Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha y la filosofía occidental, de Platón y Aristóteles a Leone Ebreo, Nietzsche o Ernst Bloch. Entre otros su objetivo es definir rigurosamente categorías que en el ámbito del hispanismo se manejan con alegre frivolidad: conciencia moderna, trágico-comedia, mesianismo, multiculturalismo, perspectivismo, escepticismo, etc. en relación a la novela de Don Quijote.

(This course originates in CLACS)

Day/Time: Tuesday, 11:00am-1:30pm

Instructor: Ana G. Alvarez

Instruction Mode: In Person

Description: In this course, we will analyze the transformations across the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, of embodied forms of queer identities, particularly travesti and Trans, in the Americas, as a way of problematizing wider constellations of affect, desire and consumption in the hemisphere as well as to inquire into the gendered dimensions of migration and transnational constellations of sexual citizenship. Trans subjectivities constitute a particularly rich prism through which to read this wider social and cultural arena, thanks to the exceptionally creative and accelerated ways in with which travesti and trans subjects and collectives have absorbed, resignified, and/or accentuated changes in biomedical technologies, shifts in familial and productive relations and their mass-media expressions, embodiments and fashion regimes. All of these, furthermore, also find a resonance chamber in the sex market at the same time as they trigger institutional as well as societal violence from prison regimes to “crimes of passion”. In reconstructing these changing imaginaries of dissident/transformative embodiments of sexuality and gender –from locas and maricas to travestis and trans persons– we shall begin by analyzing some historically and geographically specific articulations of queerness from colonial to high-modern Latin America, before zooming in on contemporary legal and biopolitical reconfigurations of gender identity as well as on the interrelations of these with trans-American migrations and broader questions of citizenship and precarization as well as the emergence of new biomedical and pharmacological technologies that facilitate a more diverse and fleeting range of transitional genders.

Day/Time: Monday, 12:30 – 2:30 pm

Instructor: Jabier Elorrieta

Instruction Mode: In person 

(This course originates in a different department)

Day/Time: Tuesday, 2 – 4:30 pm 

Instructor: Dylon Robbins 

Instruction Mode: In Person

Description: In this course, we will take an interdisciplinary and multi-media approach to intellectual history in Latin America and the Caribbean. How have Latin American and Caribbean intellectuals, artists, and activists approached the problems of culture and difference? How have they theorized the state, civil society, the public sphere, borders, violence, and belonging? How have notions of gender, heterogeneity, race and ethnicity, and nationalism related to their historical contexts and involved unique understandings of the body, sensorial experience, and perception? How does their work involve challenges to the frequently monolingual and imperial geographies of knowledge production? We will read and discuss a selection of works by Lélia Gonzalez, Sayak Valencia, Sillvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Gilberto Freyre, Marilena Chaui, Fernando Ortiz, Suely Rolnik, Roberto Schwarz, Ángel Rama, Ailton Krenak, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Suazanne Césaire, Glauber Rocha, Gloria Anzaldúa, José Carlos Mariátegui, and others.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 2 – 4 pm 

Instructor: Jens Andermann

Instruction Mode: In Person

Day/Time: Monday, 12:30 – 3:15 pm

Instructor: Taylor/Garcia

Instruction Mode: In Person