The Literatures and Cultures of the Hemispheric Americas and Spain

3 credits · Undergraduate

This seminar explores some of the Chilean Roberto Bolanos's writings he composed in Chile, Mexico City, and Spain. We will not only analyze Bolano's Nocturno de Chile , a novel about Pinochet's dictatorship, but also follow Bolano from Chile to his exile in Mexico City and Spain where he wrote his infrarealist poetry and short stories. In addition to Bolanos' work, we will also examine the Mexican writers, Yuri Herrera's novel, Senales que precederan al fin del Mundo, a novel about migration and the US-Mexico borderlands, and Sara Uribe's Antigona Gonzalez, an experimental narrative about the 'disappeared' killed by the Gulf Cartels in Tamaulipas, Mexico. Calling attention to fresh innovations in literary form, voice, multi-lingual perspective, and representation, this course also affirms the lead role of Chilean, Mexican, Latinx, and Spanish writers and artists in reshaping hemispheric Americas and global literatures and cultures. The last third of the course will explore Diego Velazquez's iconic painting "Las Meninas" and the Los Angeles artist Jay Lynn Gomez's tribute to Velazquez in her painting "Las Meninas, Beverly Hills." Here, we will explore what both Las Meninas "paintings" by Velazquez and Gomez tell us about Spain and the Greater borderlands of Los Angeles, California. We will visit both the Prado and Sofia museums in Madrid, where Velazquez's and Gomez's painting are housed. Finally, we will conclude the course by examining some of Spain's pop star, Rosalia's videos dedicated to flamenco and prison reform. We will explore Rosalia's video and song entitled "Juro Que" and see how this contemporary Spanish artist innovates flamenco's long tradition of denouncing the violence of incarceration, particularly as it relates to Gitano, or Spanish Roma, communities. By analyzing the ethno-racial and gendered dimensions of the construction of the poetic speaker/singer in "Juro Que," we will explore how Rosalia continues flamenco's tradition of decrying anti-Gitano carceral violence and revises the boundaries of this sonic tradition. In its opposition to Spanish law, as well as the ethno-racial stereotypes produced by the good Gypsy/bad Gypsy dichotomy, Rosalia's "Juro Que" comments dramatically on the historical function of the Gypsy paradigm in Spain.