The Revolutionary Rupture: Slavery, Latifundio & Rev in Carib & Lat. Amer. Lit. & Cinema (FYS)
ENGL 141F
Fall 2022 not offered
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| Crosslisting:
AFAM 141F |
From different positionings in the West, usages of the word Revolution often invoke a vertical image of rupture: a rising wind (à la Aimé Césaire); a standing militant who was once a "premodern," seated indígena and/or black (à la Che Guevara); a bottom-to-top explosion of imperial and colonial disorder and violence that cleanses with insurgent violence (à la Frantz Fanon). But to imagine revolution as vertical, and thus quickly self-exhausting, is deceptive, and relies on latent misunderstandings of ruptures and historicity. In this course, we will slow down and work through the complexities of these representations and other figurations on the verge, in the midst, and on the other side of exploding, and not exploding, and what they reveal about historicity and rupture. In this course, we will read literatures and cinemas of Haiti, The Dominican Republic, Mexico, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, and Cuba that depict insurrections (plural), revolution (as a large scale phenomenon and as a recurring rupture of normative time), and nonwhite racialized female insurgencies (often archivally elusive) that take place on latifundios (i.e., large systems of agrarian estates premised on invasions of indigenous lands), plantations, and in other spaces beyond what those formations could capture and enclose. We will study how historical insurrections and revolutions that span hundreds of years are deployed by the Caribbean and Latin American literary and cinematic imaginations to critique dangerous economic schemes of lending and "underdevelopment" that aligned with expanding U.S. military hegemony in the hemisphere since the middle of the 19th century. We will read narratives of refusals of "given" life that expose different imperial, colonial, and neo-liberal systems of oppression and their attendant philosophies of the human, non-human, and animal, including what comes to be named 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 the Caribbean and Central American regions from the late 19th into the late-20th century. While de-romanticizing the commercialized Che-t-shirt notion of "revolution" in the U.S., we will, perhaps more deeply and importantly, deconstruct revolutionary progressive discourses of hetero-masculinity, modernization, mestizaje, whitening, and "development" throughout the Americas. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA ENGL |
| Course Format: Lecture / Discussion | Grading Mode: Student Option |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Major Requirement for: (ENGL-Creative W)(ENGL-Literature) |
Major Readings:
C.L.R. James, Walter Benjamin, Josefina Saldaña Portillo, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, Juan Rulfo, Rosario Castellanos, Evelynne Trouillot, Rosario Ferré, Jacques Derrida.
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Examinations and Assignments:
Short essay (close-reading assignment), sound/multi-media project, annotated bibliography. |
Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
Contributes to fulfillment of ENGL major requirements: elective (FYS-level).
This is a First Year Seminar Course (FYS).
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