Lit and Culture of the Andes

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course introduces students to twentieth- and twenty-first-century Andean literature, film, and cultural production, with an emphasis on questions of indigeneity, migration, and place-based identities. Course materials move across the highlands of Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, and Peru in the form of novels, short stories, poetry, film, rap, photography, architecture, and visual art. Central to our in-class discussions will be the following question: What does it mean to be “Andean”? How does Andean cultural production uphold, construct, and/or deconstruct notions of “Andeanness”? How do questions of indigeneity, migration, and geographic situatedness inform renderings of the Andes, past and present? How might cultural production support or contest a sense of regional, trans-Andean identity? Students will also participate in various Quechua-language workshops aimed at exposing them to the Andes’s most widely spoken Indigenous language.