Humans and Others in Latin America: Natures, Cultures, Environments

3 units

What does it mean to inhabit the world with other beings? How are we to cultivate life -- both human and nonhuman -- in toxic environments? What does it mean to be human, and what would it mean to decenter humanity? This course addresses these questions through an exploration of more-than-human worlds in Latin America. Students will examine a variety of Latin American thought and practices through the interdisciplinary lens of environmental humanities and social sciences, unsettling presumed boundaries between human and nonhuman, real and imaginary, native and culture. We will engage primarily with ethnographic and other scholarly texts, which will be supplemented by short works of fiction, documentary film, podcasts, and works of art. In the first part of this course, students will be challenged to think about what defines the limits of the human and engage with the concept of more-than-human worlds. We will then examine the dark side of such worlds, namely, the ways in which extractive capitalism and environmental destruction demonstrate the permeability of bodies and comprise a kind of slow violence against the most vulnerable communities. In the next unit, students will consider Black and Indigenous ecological knowledge and these communities' struggles to care for their lifeways and the environments that sustain them. In our final section, we will explore multispecies entanglements through Indigenous cosmologies and the nexus of science, history, and art. Students will complete several assignments throughout the semester that have been designed to make them think imaginatively and critically about the course themes, including weekly reading responses and in-class discussion facilitation. The final assignment for this course is a creative independent research project where students will synthesize what they learned over the course of the semester and extend it through independent research. Prerequisite: L45 165D or permission of instructor.