Spring 2022

Day/Time: Tuesdays, 2:00-4:30pm

Instructor: Urayoán Noel

Instruction Mode: In Person

This seminar explores Latina/o/x performance at the intersection of two interdisciplinary fields: Latina/o/x Studies and Performance Studies. Beginning with a brief overview of both fields, the seminar will focus on classic and recent critical interventions. In engaging these critical perspectives, we will consider a range of Latina/o/x performance cultures (from underground theater and drag to spoken word, reggaeton, and performance art), while seeking to highlight differences (race, sex, gender, disability, immigration status, etc.). We will also approach performance as a frame from which to understand everyday life (questions of embodiment, ritual, and practice), from our own locations in and beyond New York City. Accordingly, New York City Latina/o/x will be a particular focus. We will talk to some theorists and practitioners, and we will examine archives of classic performances (e.g. Ana Mendieta, Asco, Josefina Báez, etc.) as well as work by emerging performers, including work that interrogates the status of performance in our digital age. Critical readings may include work by José Esteban Muñoz, Guillermo Gómez Peña, David Román, Alicia Arrizón, Laura G. Gutiérrez, Deborah Paredez, Ramón Rivera Servera, Arturo J. Aldama, Leticia Alvarado, Patricia Ybarra, Karen Jaime, Juan Flores, Frances Aparicio, Petra R. Rivera Rideau, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Wilson Valentín-Escobar, Paul Joseph López Oro, Amy Sara Carroll, Camilla Stevens, Francisco J. Galarte, Sandra Ruiz, Ren Ellis Neyra, Omaris Zamora, Diana Taylor, Petra Kuppers, and Patricia Herrera. In lieu of a final paper, students will have the option of a creative project with a framing essay.

Day/Time: Monday, 4 – 6pm 

Instructors: Víctor Sierra Matute

Instruction Mode: In Person

Description: Este seminario pondrá en diálogo dos corpus epistemológicos: la teoría del afecto y los estudios sobre el imperialismo. Desde una perspectiva transhistórica, el seminario abordará temas como los procesos de colonización, la globalización y la proto-globalización, el nacionalismo y la construcción de identidades nacionales, la emergencia de los estudios transatlánticos, los estudios transpacíficos y los transoceánicos, la teoría y práctica decolonial, entre otros temas y aproximaciones. Entre nuestras lecturas se encuentra el trabajo de Sara Ahmed, Tina Campt, Michael Hardt y Toni Negri, Barbara Fuchs, Ayesha Ramachandran o Ana Lucia Araujo. Dedicaremos la primera mitad del semestre a discutir, bajo el formato de seminario, las diferentes aproximaciones a los estudios imperiales. La segunda mitad del semestre consistirá en un taller íntegramente dedicado a discutir in situ los proyectos en curso de sus participantes. En este sentido, el seminario girará en torno a los debates imperiales tanto a nivel teórico como a nivel práctico.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 11:30 – 1:30pm 

Instructor: Licia Fiol-Matta

Instruction Mode: In Person

Description: Is Latin American feminism different from other feminisms, whether in North America, Europe, or other regions in the Global South? What has been its impact on Latinx and other US feminisms? This course will consider such questions through an initial examination of the forgotten/rejected feminisms of the 1980s, such as that of the Chilean, Julieta Kirkwood. It will then review the present-day return to 1970s feminist thinkers and to socialist feminisms of the 1970s (for example, in the contemporary feminist insurgency of May 2018 in Chile). We will devote most of the course to a sustained analysis of contemporary forms of gendered thought, responding to pivots like #niunamenos, movements against disaster capitalism, digital activism, and BIPOC feminism. We will interrogate the allocation of certain feminist knots of concern to specific Latin American regions or countries; the social subject designated by the signifier “woman,” while not discounting it; the binary understandings of gender which are in evidence in full force with the turn to the right, the reaffirmation of the nationalist family and cis separatist movements which proclaim themselves as feminist; and regional rejections of certain feminist and queer keywords (seen in linguistic alterations like “cuir” or “cuerpa”). The thread will be an intensive consideration of gender and knowledge grounded in what cultural theorist Nelly Richard refers to as the “disordering of the sign of woman.” 

Day/Time: Tuesday, 6 – 8pm 

Instructor: Sara Nadal-Melsió

Instruction Mode: In Person

Description: In 2009, the artist and essayist Hito Steyerl posed the question: Is a museum a factory? This will be our cue to begin a theoretical exploration on the nature of artistic labor and its speculative possibilities. As a site where production and exhibition overlap, the contemporary art museum has transformed artistic labor and questioned its status as both art and labor. The heteronomous conditions of production of the artwork, its constitutional morphism and capacity to move between disciplines and form of labors—material/immaterial, visible/invisible, creative/productive—can articulate a critique of the division between art and praxis or the dualities of manual-visible and intellectual-invisible labor at the core of the value form. Thus, the contemporary artwork needs to be understood as a social object with an agonistic relationship to the conditions of its production, a product of specific and contested conditions of possibility where formal and content-based commitments converge. Reading Adorno against the grain, aesthetic autonomy can be reformulated as a site of resistance (rather than aestheticism) that is embedded in the relation between the multiple forms of labor involved in artistic production. Paradoxically, one could argue that aesthetic autonomy already belongs in the agonistic space of labor as its condition of possibility. While the reflection over precariousness as art’s condition of possibility is a fairly recent phenomenon (as artworkers continue to grow in the midst of an exploitative economy), it has already situated the definition of artistic labor at the center of discussions over the nature of aesthetic processes of production. In a way, pauperized art workers may be uniquely positioned to address art’s social alienation under capitalism. Topics will include: labor, collaboration, performance, contemporaneity, aesthetic autonomy, community, agonism, situatedness. Participants are expected to bring materials connected to the course’s topics and relevant to their research to be included in seminar discussions. Class will be conducted in English. Final papers may be written either in English or Spanish.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 10 – 12:30pm

Instructor: Jens Andermann

Instruction Mode: In Person

Description: This class offers a survey of Latin American cultural production from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century in relation to what ‘culture’ has traditionally taken to be its other as well as its driving force and content – the nonhuman lives and materialities it used to proscribe to the realm of barbarism and savagery or submit to a pedagogics of ‘cultivation’. The landscape form, from the implementation of the colonial plantation system to the apogee of aesthetic modernity, represented the cultural apparatus in charge of allocating subjects and objects in this interplay of lives and materialities, and it did so in twofold fashion: as space-constituting ‘landscape in visu’ and as place-making ‘landscape in situ’, as image and architecture, prospect and garden. More recently, however, the inversion of figure and ground associated with the Anthropocene or Capitalocene has imploded the aesthetic and political frameworks of landscape, to the point of exchanging it in contemporary art practice for novel, medium- and genre-unspecific assemblages of the living and the material: a mode of engagement, in fact, that had been in evidence in literature and arts from the Global South from the very outset of colonial-extractive modernity. Rather than an anthology of key texts and artifacts, however, this course will attempt to approach a limited number of works and constellations by way of a genealogy of the paradigms of spatial critique these have invited, from literary, art-historical and anthropological approaches to the landscape experience through to an incipient theorization of what surges beyond the latter’s horizon, as we approach the edge of life.

Day/Time: Thursday, 3 - 5:30pm

Instructor:  Liz Fink

Description: This course will introduce students to the idea of the public humanities, and to think about what public humanities has to offer for scholars of French Studies. In addition to readings, the class will examine digital tools, including maps, soundscapes, and archived exhibits, and explore public humanities sites in New York City as well as feature discussions by public humanities practitioners.