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CS92PROD
Contemporary Puerto Rican Art and Literature

ENGL 231
Fall 2020 not offered
Crosslisting: AMST 251
Course Cluster and Certificates: Caribbean Studies Minor

This course studies the works of contemporary Puerto Rican filmmakers, performance artists, poets, novelists, painters, conceptual artists, musicians and sound artists. Puerto Rico continues to be one of the U.S. military's and its corporate guises' favorite laboratories; its beauty and complexity are part of what filmmaker Beatriz Santiago Muñoz calls a "chimerical ecology." In this course, we will think with this key phrase, "chimerical ecology," and many aesthetic survival strategies generated by contemporary Puerto Rican literature and art. We will consider the many forms of camouflage set into play in this "chimerical ecology," which reveal the multiple forms of destruction at work by the U.S. war machine, the debt crisis, tourism, and other forces, and the forms of resistance, transformation, and life that only art help us sense. How do you prepare to see what is camouflaged? How do you get ready for what you don't know? Can we reshape our sensorium to feel out and make possibilities that capitalism and settler colonialism render impossible? We will study what appears to hide out in language and visual codes, along with the disidentifying discourses, counter-discourses, aesthetics, poetics, and live art forms that transform the sensorial experiences of space. Students who do not read and think in Caribbean Spanishes are very welcome to take this course, but a minimally playfully bilingual attitude is encouraged.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA ENGL
Course Format: Lecture / DiscussionGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Major Requirement for: (CBST-MN)(ENGL)(ENGL-Literature)

Last Updated on MAR-28-2024
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