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In this course students will analyze the products, practices, and perspectives of the complex and varied region of Latin America. Students gain an understanding of how colonialism, imperialism and neoliberalism have shaped the region and its people. Film, popular culture, and identity politics will be used as the foreground for analysis from Latin America to Latinx. Taught entirely in Spanish. Discussions, student writing, and presentations are major components of the course.

This course analyzes the various roles played by performance in the negotiation of power and identity construction in Latin America, the Caribbean, and The emerging Latina/o diasporas in the United States, from a hemispheric standpoint. We will study how the mechanisms of spectacle have been used, and continue to be employed to represent, implement, and subvert colonial and neocolonial orders. We will look at performance, as a vehicle for knowledge creation and transfer across temporal and spatial environments, in the context of border narratives, new technologies, tourism, migration, globalization, and cultural memory.

This course offers an in-depth study of works by U.S. indigenous writers from the 1960's to the present. The readings cover multiple genres of poetry, drama, memoir, and fiction in various tones of humor, suspense, spirituality, and political urgency. The course will provide opportunities to learn about multiple tribal cultures and histories as well as social issues pertinent to indigenous communities. U.S. indigenous writers also engage with larger critical questions dealing with environmentalism, feminism, colonialism, and social justice, but through a particularly indigenous lens. Students will be encouraged to read and think critically, and to reflect deeply about indigenous frameworks and approaches to important contemporary issues.

Cultural production in Spanish has long engaged with the many ways in which sex and gender are "done" (i.e., performed) and undone. This course profiles fiction and non-fiction writings as well as film on these topics authored by women and LGBTQQI persons from many parts of the Spanish speaking world, with an emphasis on the intersection of gender and sex with class, race, religion, and ethnicity.