“El gran zoo”: Animals in Latin American Culture

From César Vallejo’s dismembered spider, to Julio Cortázar’s house tiger, to Nicolás Guillén’s satirical zoo, this course traces the varied ways in which animals appear in 20th and 21st century Latin American culture. We will pay particular attention to the zones of entanglement between the human and non-human, in order to analyze how a number of Latin American writers and filmmakers tackle oppositions between nature and culture, civilización y barbarie, city and countryside, self and other. In unsettling the human-animal divide, Latin American cultures respond to some of the most pressing—perhaps dehumanizing—issues of the century.