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CS92PROD
Slavery, Latifundio, and Revolution in Latin American Literature and Cinema (FYS)
ENGL 141F
Spring 2019
Section: 01  

In this course, we will study literatures and cinemas of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, and Cuba that depict insurrectionist and revolutionary ruptures that take place on plantations, latifundios, and other spaces beyond what those formations could capture. We will study how insurrections (plural), revolution (as a large scale phenomenon), and (sometimes archivally elusive) racialized female insurgencies are deployed by Caribbean and Latin American literary imaginations to critique the dangerous economic situations in the early 20th century of U.S.-backed client states--referred to dismissively in the United States as "banana republics" after the United Fruit Company converted U.S. naval ships into cargo boats that would import exploitatively planted and harvested bananas--and the schemes of "underdevelopment" that aligned with expanding U.S. hegemony in the hemisphere. We will engage narratives, poetics, and music of revolution that expose different systems of oppression, and different scales of radical motion, including the range of events and phenomena in Hispaniola that aggregate as the Haitian Revolution of the late 18th century, insurrections in Chiapas against casta and latifundio before and after the Mexican Revolution of 1910, and revolts against U.S. economic and military interventions in Guatemala, Puerto Rico, and Cuba in the 20th century. We will attend to the aesthetic, formal, and structural ways that revolutions are (re)presented as vertical ruptures that explode the past, and as horizontal historical formations that continue select legacies of the past that they claim to critique. While we're at it, we will deconstruct revolutionary progressive discourses of hetero-masculinity, modernity, and development. We'll sense for smaller scales of varied aesthetic, sensorial, and slow forms of something in the neighborhood of revolutions.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA ENGL
Course Format: Lecture / DiscussionGrading Mode: Student Option
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Major Requirement for: (ENGL-Creative W)(ENGL-Literature)
Past Enrollment Probability: 90% or above

Last Updated on MAR-28-2024
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