Researching Cultures: Cultural Geographies of the Hispanic World

3 units

This course provides students with an overview of the cultural history of various regions of the Hispanic World, considering its global, transatlantic, hemispheric, national, and regional formations through print, visual, and sonic media and genres. Taking the multilayered tension between power and resistance as a conceptual framework, the course explores four key cultural geographies: the colonial space, the national space, the migrant space, and the natural space. Each cultural geography maps the oppositional forces that have shaped various regions of the Hispanic World since Western colonial expansion: colonialism and decolonial thinking, melting pot utopias and ethnic communities, revolution and the State, modernity, race, and gender identities, and extractivismo and ecological dissidence. Materials include films, songs, short stories, poetry, comics, and digital culture.This is a writing-intensive course. Students who have taken more than four Spanish culture or literature classes are not allowed in this course and must proceed to a Major Seminar.