Spectacle in Latin America

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

The seminar seeks to develop new approaches to the visual and ephemeral material cultures of rituals, festivities, ceremonies, and processions that helped articulate pre-and post-conquest societies in Latin America. The course studies the evidence in codices, paintings, prints, music, dance, costume, ephemeral art, and ancient and modern rituals. Mesoamerican, Andean, and Viceregal’s understanding of existence exhibited a profound sense of the theatrical, which was inextricably linked to religious, political, and cultural spheres. By examining the evolution of spectacle in Latin America from ancient times to the present, the seminar considers definitions, source materials, and interpretative issues in the study of ritual and ceremony. The course explores how rituals create and maintain—or transform—a society’s cultural identity and social relations while investigating the inherent problems of ephemeral and often unscripted and unrecorded practices. Placing particular emphasis on social, historical, sensorial, cultural, economic, and political aspects, the course introduces students to major theoretical concepts of belonging, inclusion, and exclusion. Moreover, the seminar aims to understand identity construction while challenging the intersection of art, spectacle, memory, tradition, race, and class in Latin America.