From Texts to Table: Food, Literature and Culture in Latin America

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

If the saying "We are what we eat" is true, then food reflects and determines our identity, our subjectivity, and our very being. Through the study of Latin American canonical and less-known literary texts from Colonial to contemporary times, this course focuses on food as a cultural artifact shaped by the dynamics of colonialism, modernization, immigration, and globalization. From a multidisciplinary perspective that includes Literary, Cultural and Gender Studies, as well as History and Anthropology, we will explore topics such as food exchange value, regional and indigenous traditions, social behavior and consumption, cooking imaginaries and social structure, culinary technologies, and gender correlations, among others. Primary sources include texts by Cristóbal Colón, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Ricardo Palma, Esteban Echeverría, Juana Manuela Gorriti, Soledad Acosta de Samper, Rubén Darío, Rosario Castellanos, Gabriel García Márquez, and Isabel Allende. We will read these works together with theoretical approaches by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Walter Mignolo, Pierre Bordieu, and Walter Benjamin.