Lit,Film,Music Human Rights

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

In this course, students will analyze literature, music, film and other arts that represent human rights abuses in Latin America. Students will consider, therefore, the verbal, musical and visual imaging of various forms of human brutality, including torture, homicide, war, genocide, massacres, sexual violence, and corporal mutilation. Students will also examine canonical documents of human rights from the U.S. and French revolutions through today, plus critical and theoretical texts that conceptualize human rights per se. Different phases of the course will focus on Argentina, Chile, Colombia, indigenous societies in Latin America, and other hemispheric spaces. Students will also discuss Latin American intersections of the arts and human rights that are connected to institutions, ideas and individuals rooted in Washington, D.C. If students in the course would like to study additional arts involving human rights from a particular place in Latin America or about a particular Latin American topic, class space will be made available for those further foci and the syllabus will be amended accordingly during the semester. This course will be taught at both the 3000 level and the 4000 level. Students who take it at the 3000 level will have shorter assignments than those who take it at the 4000 level. In addition to undertaking conventional oral and written assignments, students will participate four times during the semester with an organization or group dedicated to human rights, and write informal reflection papers on how those experiences relate to course readings. Students will also visit three Washington museums dedicated to human rights. By the end of the semester, students will have deepened their knowledge of Latin America and furthered their abilities to discuss and debate the principal questions of human rights as refracted through the arts. This course will be taught in Spanish.