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CS92PROD
Cuban Literature and Film: Imagination, Revolt, and Melancholia
SPAN 296
Spring 2025
Section: 01  
Crosslisting: CGST 324, COL 314, LAST 315

This course surveys the major aesthetic and socio-historical movements in modern and contemporary Cuba. Since the late 19th century, the island of Cuba has been at the center of a number of key epochal disputes: between colonialism and independence, racism and racial justice, neocolonialism and revolution, liberalism and socialism, isolationism and globalization. In the arts, the turn of the century launched a period of great imaginative invention. Considering the singular place of Cuba in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the globe, this course addresses some of the most representative works of Cuban literature and film since independence until the present time. Imagination, revolt, and melancholia are the three concepts that will orient our discussion. Imagination refers both to artistic creation and to the collective capacity of projecting new worlds, utopias, or impossible realities. Revolt, as opposed to revolution, is not restrained to politics as usual but relates rather to a deep experience of discontent and a return (from the Latin revolvere) to ancient psycho-social strata. Finally, melancholia serves as a point of view to understand what happens when history does not live up to emancipatory expectations. Special attention will be given to Afrocubanismo, ethnographic literature, the avant-garde aesthetics of the group Orígenes, Marvelous Realism, testimony, revolution, socialist experimental film, diaspora, the Special Period, and post-Soviet life.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA RLAN
Course Format: Lecture / DiscussionGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: SPAN221
Fulfills a Requirement for: (CBST-MN)(CSCT)(HISP)(HRAD-MN)
Past Enrollment Probability: 75% - 89%

Last Updated on DEC-08-2024
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