Narratives of the Latin American Jungle
SPAN 278
Spring 2026
| Section:
01
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| Crosslisting:
LAST 278 |
This course is a critical exploration of the ways in which forests and its plurality of beings, and particularly the tropical territories marked as jungle or rainforest in South America (the Amazon, the Darien), have been narrated, imagined and contested in cultural production and in indigenous and peasant ontologies, place-based practices and resistance for more than a century. We will investigate the construction of jungle as a territory of dwelling shaped by the relational condition between human and other-than-human beings (plants, animals, water) and as a place where diverse anxieties about sovereignty, politics, race, development, gender, and subversion collide. We will examine this cultural geography in relation to diverse histories of modernization, development and extractivism, the global angst over the environment and its destruction, local processes of (cosmopolitical) resistance, and the various political and environmental conflicts that have shaped the region over the past century. Attending to Amazonian indigenous thought and to political ecology and other intellectual practices emerging from Latin America, as well as to literature, film, popular culture and visual art, we will discuss the potential to disavow modern/colonial binaries like nature-culture, human-nonhuman and civilization-barbarism, in a place that has been central to the way in which Latin America has been imagined for centuries. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA RLAN |
| Course Format: Lecture / Discussion | Grading Mode: Graded |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: (Hispanic Literatures and Cultures)(Latin American Studies)(Romance Studies) |
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Past Enrollment Probability: Not Available |
| SECTION 01 |
Major Readings: Wesleyan RJ Julia Bookstore
Narrative and poetry by various South American authors and thinkers of the 20th and 21st century ; a wide array of Latin American, US and European films and visual art by artists from Colombia, Perú, Ecuador and Brazil ; theory by Kohn, Viveiros de Castro, Ileana Rodriguez, among others.
Films include Fitzcarraldo (Herzog, 1982) , Burden of Dreams (Blank, 1982), Iracema, uma transa amazonica (Bodanzky, 1976) , El vuelco del cangrejo, (Ruiz Navia, 2009), Antes o tempo não acabava (Baldo/Andrade, 2017), Los silencios (Seigner, 2018), El abrazo de la serpiente (Guerra, 2016), among others.
Visual art by Abel Rodríguez, Nohemí Perez, Miguel Angel Rojas, Miller Lagos, Alberto Baraya and other South American artists.
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Examinations and Assignments:
two essays, shorter written assignments, a curated art exhibit project and weekly participation in online forum. |
Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
This class is intended for students who have completed SPAN 221 with a B- or better. Students who have not done so should consult with the professor before preregistering. Readings, written assignments, and class discussions will be in Spanish. Only COL students may take this course CR/U. Students are expected to be active/informed participants in class discussions. You will improve all of your language skills in this course. |
| Instructor(s): Ospina,María Times: .M.W... 02:50PM-04:10PM; Location: TBA |
| Total Enrollment Limit: 15 | | SR major: 8 | JR major: 2 | | |
| Seats Available: 15 | GRAD: X | SR non-major: 1 | JR non-major: 1 | SO: 2 | FR: 1 |
| Drop/Add Enrollment Requests | | | | | |
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