Spring 2023

Day/Time: Thursday, 6 – 8pm 

Instructors: Carlos Veloso

Instruction Mode: In Person

Day/Time: Monday, 2 - 4:45pm

Instructor: Urayoán Noel

Instruction Mode: In Person

Description: This course will focus on late nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. Latina/o/x literary and cultural productions before 1965, in an effort to address a gap in the field of Latina/o/x Studies. Can we conceive of one or many Latina/o/x modernisms that can help us bridge “the Latino Nineteenth Century” (Lazo and Alemán, 2016) and the 1960s and “post-Sixties” (Dalleo and Machado Sáez, 2007) genealogies that have shaped Latina/o/x Studies? Can we do so without essentializing, and while complicating theorizations and chronologies of modernisms and modernities in both Anglo-American and Latin American contexts? What can we learn about Latina/o/x racialization, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and other differences by engaging texts from this era, and how can these knowledges help us inflect a range of critical conversations? Can we hold on to a sense of the eccentric literariness of many Latina/o/x modernist texts while making room for expressive cultures, and for modernist imaginaries that can unsettle the lettered city? In recognition of the historical invisibility of U.S. Latina/o/x histories within the modernist archive, and of the crucial role of New York City within Latina/o/x modernisms, we will engage with relevant materials from local archives such as the Schomburg Center, the Dominican Archives at City College, and the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, and we may visit one or more of these archives. Assignments will consist of an archival midterm project and a final research paper.

Readings may include literary texts by Américo Paredes, Jesús Colón, Josefina Niggli, Pura Belpré, Jovita González, Arturo Schomburg, Leonor Villegas de Magnón, Salomón de la Selva, William Carlos Williams, José Martí, Fabio Fiallo, Sousândrade, and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, and we will also consider works of expressive culture (music, dance, theater, performance, etc.) as they have helped shape Latina/o/x modernist imaginaries. Critical readings may include texts by Ramón Saldívar, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Laura Lomas, John Alba Cutler, Lorgia García Peña, Lisa Sánchez-González, Vanessa K. Valdés, Antonio López, Marissa K. López, David Garcia, Rita Keresztesi, Fredric Jameson, and Julio Ramos.

Day/Time: Monday, 5:30pm - 7:30pm

Instructor: Licia Fiol-Matta

Instruction Mode: In Person

Day/Time: Tuesday, 2 - 4pm

Instructor: Gabriela Basterra

Instruction Mode: In Person

Day/Time: Tuesday, 4:30 – 6:30 pm

Instructor: Verónica Gago

Instruction Mode: In person 

Description: La crítica argentina Josefina Ludmer nos enseñó un arte de la especulación. Especular, dice ella, es dar una sintaxis a ideas de otrxs desde un territorio en que las usamos. Por lo tanto especular es también una práctica material de uso. Especular, como remite la palabra original, tiene que ver con las imágenes que juegan a espejarse pero es además el saber sobre el porvenir que reclaman las finanzas. La especulación es un modo de manejo del tiempo, de fabular sus posibilidades, de abrirlo al acontecimiento pero también de sacarle provecho, de hacerlo rendir. Y simultáneamente es poner a cuenta, en contabilidad futura, a los territorios, conectando de un modo particular lo abstracto y lo concreto.

Las prácticas feministas contemporáneas pueden leerse desde los territorios que disputan. Es allí donde se sitúan para inventar léxicos políticos y producir organización, para alterar sensibilidades y reclamar recursos. Esos territorios desprenden al mismo tiempo vectores de desestabilización de duraciones variables. El arraigo de los feminismos, la reinvención comunitaria a la que dan lugar, la imaginación geográfica que alimentan son parte de una cartografía que está en plena expansión.

En este seminario quisiera abordar distintos territorios para hacerlos funcionar como locaciones concretas donde las prácticas feministas despliegan su versatilidad, ponen en juego estrategias y apuestan a la transformación radical. Son territorios, entiendo, que tienen elementos en común: en ellos se escala la conflictividad, se capilariza la masividad y se materializan temporalidades contenciosas. Territorios del trabajo, del saber, del despojo y de la organización serán las zonas para mapear y ubicar prácticas que están siendo clave en el movimiento feminista internacionalista de la última década.

El seminario se organizará en torno a los siguientes ejes:

Territorios del trabajo

1. Reproducción social y neoliberalismo: un antagonismo al ras de la vida cotidiana.

2. La huelga feminista: como práctica, como marco de inteligibilidad de la precariedad, como horizonte de sindicalismo feminista.

Territorios del saber

3. Saber como ritmo colectivo: ¿qué saberes políticos se están movilizando para la revuelta?

4. Disputas metodológicas y epistémicas.

Territorios del despojo

5. Cuerpos-territorios: extractivismo y explotación.

6. Lo doméstico en disputa: la casa como laboratorio.

Territorios de la organización

7. Asambleas: inteligencia colectiva y evaluación situada

8. ¿Qué significa acuerpar y coordinarse entre luchas?

Day/Time: Wednesday, 5:00 – 7:00 pm 

Instructor: Jill Lane

Instruction Mode: In Person

Description: This seminar studies theater and performance in the colonial Americas, across the long period of European conquest and colonization of the region, including Mesoamerica, the Andes, the transimperial Caribbean (including colonial St. Domingue, Jamaica, and Cuba), and some comparative engagement with territories of what is today the United States (New Orleans, the southwestern borderlands) and with the colonial Philippines. We consider different approaches to the geopolitical imaginaries this period, including the dense Atlantic formation forged through the trade in enslaved people, and ask how performance helped to instantiate or contest those imaginaries. We consider the uses of spectacle, performance, and theater in the forceful imperative of religious conversion, as well as the complex dynamics of cultural and linguistic translation (and mis-translation), improvisation, and invention that such practices entailed. We consider a continuum of shared iconography across visual and performance cultures in the colonial baroque. Finally, we engage a comparative approach to 18th and 19th century racial impersonation by considering practices of redface, blackface, and yellowface in various sites and their valenced participation in the development of local, creolized discourses of anticolonialism and early national sentiment. Students will be asked to conduct original research in this area to share with the seminar.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 3 – 5 pm 

Instructor: Zeb Tortorici

Instruction Mode: In Person

Description: With an eye toward expanding the doctoral dissertation corpus of primary texts, this course interrogates the notion of the “archive” that has been radically opened up by activists, archivists, and scholars in recent decades. This includes, among other things, grassroots activism, radical historiographies, embodied methodologies, oral histories, cultural ephemera, film and photography, pornography, art and performance. As we explore the ways in which archives are often symbolic colonizing and nationalist projects, we will also think about how archives and documentary collections become sites of activism. We will also analyze colonial archives, alternative literacies, digital archives and processes of digitization, access to archives, embodied research methodologies, the body as archive, LGBT/queer archives, and other public memory projects. How do some archival narratives privilege models of historical subject recovery, such that they purport to recuperate (and define) particular voices and subjectivities of the past? How do such archival engagements reassert and/or rupture traditional notions of archival authority? How are libraries, archives, and other (digital) repositories mediated spaces, and how do documented voices undergo several stages of transmission and filtering? What role might archival absence play in our scholarship? Enrolled graduate students will engage with archival records (digitally, materially, in person, etc.) in order to develop a final paper/project that best advances their own long-term research goals. 

Day/Time: Thursday, 3 – 5 pm

Instructor: Laura Torres-Rodríguez

Instruction Mode: In Person

Description: El modernismo fue el primer movimiento literario latinoamericano en construirse en torno a un discurso de autonomía estética a partir de distintos sistemas de apropiación y manipulación de la escritura europea. Este seminario propone una serie de constelaciones textuales para estudiar la red interpretativa y la comunidad de lectores que se construyen a partir de este reclamo de autonomía. El propósito es entender el modernismo como un régimen de percepción e interpretación del arte dinámico cuyos límites se negocian constantemente a través de la inclusión o exclusión de distintos artefactos culturales. Aunque el modernismo ha sido considerado el epítome de la alta cultura letrada latinoamericana, nos concentremos en explorar aquéllos contenidos u objetos asociados a la exterioridad urbana, al (mal) gusto popular, al consumo, a la reproducción en masa y, en términos de género y sexualidad, a lo sentimental, lo“femenino” y a prácticas sexuales divergentes. Es decir, nos interesa resaltar los bajos instintos, afectos y tendencias de la alta cultura latinoamericana. Este curso presenta escenas donde estos temas asociados a la decadencia decimonónica –vinculada a su vez con discursos occidentales sobre la raza, la enfermedad o el subdesarrollo– se convierten en instancias de definición continental.

Este seminario también propone revisar la producción crítica y académica en torno al modernismo para proponer la centralidad del movimiento en la construcción del campo de los estudios latinoamericanos desde los años 1960 hasta el presente. Por esta razón, el calendario de lectura se divide en cinco debates (meta) críticos sobre el movimiento. Estas cartografías contraponen modos de análisis literario divergentes que reflejan las tendencias actuales del campo.

Por último, nos interesa explorar cómo la reafirmación del carácter inútil y superfluo del arte en la sociedad capitalista –la defensa de la autonomía– le otorga al modernismo su fuerza para expresar otras formas de discapacidad social más allá del dominio de lo propiamente estético. Por esta razón, la escritura modernista ofrece una plataforma de exhibición y dominio de expresión a otras subjetividades y cuerpos invisibles hasta el momento. La motivación final es estudiar la capacidad de la teoría estética de orientarse hacia otros modelos de lectura como el feminismo, la teoría de los afectos, los nuevos materialismos, etc. Intentaré entonces adelantar una lectura del modernismo como un corpus textual auto-determinado en cuya escritura ya se encuentra su apertura política y su futuridad.

Day/Time: Tuesdays: 11am - 1:45pm

Instructors: Ana Dopico

Description: “The Caribbean,” as David Scott has argued, “is not merely modern…. it is modern in a fundamentally inaugural way.” What does it mean to think of the Caribbean as an inaugural imaginary? And what does the Caribbean mean in a post-colonial, post-socialist, post-revolutionary age? A long host of thinkers, writers and artists of the nineteenth and twentieth century have insisted on the centrality of the Caribbean as root and rhizome in our understanding of modernity and its elements: enlightenment and capital, race and empire, sovereignty and simulation, culture and nation, and, most romantically, or tragically, revolution. But to think the Caribbean adequately one has to think beyond the dialectics of roots and rhizome, beyond the poetics of relation, archipelago and diaspora. This demands too that we read beyond the tragic and monumental tropes of the Caribbean and read instead minor forms and minor keys. Thinking and reading the Caribbean requires not only linguistic and theoretical fluencies, but a capacity to read deep contexts and contingencies within apparent economies of cultural and material scarcity. It requires the capacity to engage the master paradigms of modernity and simultaneously engage the more slippery problems of temporality, contingency, misunderstanding, as well as the violent and demoralizing mechanisms of domination, transaction and subordination. Lately, it means relentlessly reading for environmental catastrophe.

Most Hispanophone readers have never read The Black Jacobins or Notebook of Return to the Native Land. Most Anglophone readers have most likely never read Lydia Cabbrera or Virgilio Piñera. This course considers key texts and works of the Caribbean archipelago and reads them comparatively and sometimes against the grain of their national, regional and postcolonial inscriptions. We will read major cultural works and lesser-known expressions, major literary works and alongside minor or forgotten forms. We will consider how the cultural monuments of the Caribbean have occluded collective politics, aesthetic experiments, insurgent movements and ephemeral forms. We counterpose the monumentality of literature to the epistemologies and historical consciousness of other cultural practices, aiming both for the contrapuntal and the counterintuitive. How, for example, have we come to understand the Haitian Revolution or the Cuban Revolution within grand narratives and what would it mean to read in them not epic, tragic destinies but more banal parables about modernity —destinies consonant with other forms of communal politics, other orders of transaction and betrayal, from Paris, to Prague, from Berlin to Grenada?

Comparative questions abound: What does it mean to read a history of revolution and civil rights in the Caribbean nineteenth century? What is the specificity of Caribbean race theory? What is the distance between a history of literature and a history of print culture in the Caribbean? How does literature compete with visual aesthetics? How do we “read” Aponte’s lost book or desacralize Walcott’s Omeros? How does Patrick Chamoiseau destroy the postcolonial novel? How does Dulce María Loynaz precede Sebald by half a century? Why is Virgilio Piñera like Franz Kafka? We will also ask about discursive notions of the Caribbean: what and whether the reparative poetics of relation and antillanité hold.

We will be based in the Hispanophone Caribbean but actively engage the divisions this linguistic geography and Francophone, Anglophone, and Kréyol Caribbean studies and trace cultural and theoretical genealogies and segregations, asking if the Caribbean has a common culture beyond the major tropic/al conceits that artists and scholars have used to bind literary production. We will ask, in the tradition of Edward Said, whether, like the East, “Caribbeanism” becomes a career, what the field might mean, and how it exists. What is the place of the Caribbean in the conceptions and political destinies of the American hemisphere or the Global South?

The syllabus will include selections from major canonical Caribbean texts (Casal, Hostos, James, Métraux, Césaire, Price Mars, Mañach, Marinello, Ortiz, Cabrera, Walcott, Brathwaite, Lamming),  theorists and historians of the Caribbean (James, Cesaire, Glissant, Moreno Fraginals, Benítez Rojo, Trouillot, Scott),  twentieth century literature (Carpentier, Burgos, Loynaz, Lezama, Rodríguez Juliá, Piñera, Walcott)  through to the post-colonial Caribbean Anglophone corpus and onto contemporary writers from Rita Indiana Hernández to Marlon James.  We will pay special attention to breaking postcolonial linguistic segregations, but also be mindful of the operations and problem of genre, print culture, journal, performance, and the pedagogies of civil society.  We will consider the formation of Caribbean Studies as a field and think of the ways that journals from Orígenes and Tropiques, to Callaloo and Small Axe transform critical, artistic and activist interventions on the Caribbean, and translate to intellectual practices in the academy.

Primary Texts

• José Martí, Campaign Diary
• Jean Price Mars, Ansi parla l’oncle
• Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint
• Aimé Césaire, Notebooks of a Return to the Native Land
• Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of this World
• Lydia Cabrera, Jardín
• Severo Sarduy, De donde son los cantantes
• Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Tres tristes tigres
• Kamau Brathwaite, The Arrivants, Contradictory Omens
• Derek Walcott, In a Green Night, Omeros
• Franétienne, Dezafi and paintings
• Rita Indiana Hernandez, La estrategia de Chochueca, Papi
• Edwige Danticat, The Farming of Bones
• Marlon James, The Book of Night Women
• Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Historical and Theoretical Texts:

• Sidney Mintz, Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations (2010)
• Antonio Benítez Rojo, The Repeating Island
• Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation
• David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity
• Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden
• Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World
• Kate Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti
• Marial Iglesias, A Cultural History of Cuba during US Occupation
• Lara Putnam, The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica
• Harvey Neptune, Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and US Occupation
• Robin Derby, The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo
• Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror:  Haiti and Cuba in the Age of Revolution
• Yolanda Martinez San Miguel, The Coloniality of Diaspora
• Kaiama Glover, Haiti Unbound
• Nancy Mirabal, Suspect Freedoms
• Marlene Daut, Tropics of Haiti
• Peter Hudson, Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean
• Yarimar Bonilla, Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment

Major journals and websites:

Callaloo, Small Axe, Repeating Islands, Caribbean Memory Project, 80 grados, El estornudo

Other resources:

The Puerto Rico Syllabus from the Unpayable Debt Working Group: https://puertoricosyllabus.com/