Tropical Fictions: Geography and Literature in Latin American Culture

Tropical nature in Latin America has been represented in conflicting ways: a place of leisure and sensuality, but also of depravity and sloth; a place of infinite riches but also a space where disease and racial degeneration thrive. Tracing the variations and endurances of these tropes in 18th- to 21st-century Western consciousness, this course aims to re-think the tropics in literature, film and the arts from a vantage point different to that of temperate-climate European civilization. Readings include canonical fictions such as La vorágine (1924), 19th-century European travelogues from the region, as well as contemporary indigenous art.