Literatures of Work and the Work of Literature in Tropical Latin America

This seminar investigates the ways in which labor has been represented in tropical Latin American literature from Independence until the mid-20th century. We will explore the representations of different agro-export tropical booms in fiction —tobacco, rubber, banana, among others— in order to understand how work determined the ways in which populations and landscapes were imagined into being. Finally, this seminar will incorporate fictions of labor that appear more difficult to control or are rendered as gothic: vagrancy and banditry. Seminar readings and discussion will be in Spanish.