Courses - Fall 2012
Access codes are required for registration. All CLACS students are required to schedule an advising session.
LATC-GA 10 - Beginning Quechua I
Day/Time: TBA
Prof. Odi Gonzales
Location: TBA
LATC-GA 20 - Intermediate Quechua I
Day/Time: TBA
Prof. Odi Gonzales
Location: TBA
LATC-GA 1001- Introduction to Latin American and Caribbean Studies I: Iberian-Atlantic and Colonial Perspectives
Day/Time: Wednesday, 5:00pm-7:30pm
Prof. Sarah Sarzynski
Location: Room 404W KJCC
This is a CLACS core course. All new entering students must register for this course.
Course Description: This course is both a history of the peoples, cultures, and nations of Iberia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and a history and wide-ranging survey of the various disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to the area, including the area studies paradigm itself. Some of the readings are included as a means to explore the boundaries of the established disciplines. The purpose is not only to introduce Latin American and Caribbean realities but also to review the scholarly, intellectual, and political frameworks according to which these realities are discerned. Latin Americanist and Caribbeanist faculty from throughout the University are invited to speak about the history of the disciplinary and interdisciplinary frameworks for the study of the region, as well as the prevailing methods in the present moment. Some sessions are led by guest faculty; discussion in all sessions are facilitated by student study group presentations.
Part I of the course covers the pre-invasion Americas, Iberian Empire, and the production of the Imperial/Colonial world and the “first modernity” through the early republican era, the mid-19th century. It also introduces the background to the genesis of plantation societies in Spanish America and Portuguese Brazil, and the contesting colonial projects in the Caribbean region, also involving slave plantation labor, of Britain, France, and the Dutch.
LATC-GA 1007 – Latin American Cities: Masses, Myths, and Medias
Day/Time: Thursday, 4:00pm-6:00pm
Prof. Beatriz Jaguaribe
Location: TBA
Course Description: This course selectively examines how urban imaginaries were/are created through artistic inventions, media productions and political agendas in modernist and contemporary Latin American cities. Combining specific case studies with theoretical questions, we will be addressing three broad thematic issues: how cities were/are shaped both imaginatively and materially by different media; how urban configurations of the crowd, masses and multitudes has changed from modernist agendas to contemporary cultural practices; how modernist urban mythologies have been transformed by contemporary branding strategies of the entrepreneurial city.
The comparative analysis of modernist and contemporary urban representations and experiences also entails tracing the different cultural constructions of the “city of letters” created by national modernist intelligentsias in the 1930s – 50s in contrast to the current audio-visual metropolis influenced by global networking and the emergence of new social protagonists. While exploring the modernist urban imaginaries of the 1930s and the 1950s, we will address how different regimes such as Vargas’ in Brazil, Perón’s in Argentina, Cardenas’ in Mexico, among others, used public photography and film to generate visions of the future and depictions of the masses. By focusing on contemporary urban productions in different Latin American scenarios we will also discuss how urban mythologies relate to history, cultural consumption and the political disputes of the city.
LATC-GA 1010 – Reading and Research Seminar
Please discuss with your advisor.
LATC-GA 1014 – Special Topics: Contemporary Racisms in the Americas
Day/Time: Thursday, 1:30pm-4:00pm
Prof. Pamela Calla
Location: TBA
LATC-GA 1020 – Topics Seminar: Critical Approaches to Intercultural and Bilingual Education
Day/Time: Tuesday, 11:00am-1:30pm
Prof. Pamela Calla
Location: TBA
LATC-GA 2030.001 – Topics: History, Memory, Patrimony, and Personhood
Day/Time: Tuesday, 2:00 - 4:45pm
Prof. Thomas Abercrombie
Location: 25 Waverly Place, Rm 612
Course Description: This course surveys the realms of memory, social continuity, and representation of the past and of historical process or change, seeking especially to understand the techniques, locations, and kinds of social memory that bridge the gap between remembered personal experience (province of cognitive psychology and oral history) and the externally-received representations of museology and school-book history (territory of the Foucauldean subject-shaping "archive"). That gap, we will find, is filled by the vast bulk of what once was called culture or social process. On the one hand, the course is a survey and history of the interdiscipline of 'anthrohistory' and it's studies of the past, of cultural change over time, and of representations of the past whether written, performed, or curated; on the other it is a treatment of the role of narration in the collective person's construction of itself. Between externally imposed or received "interpellations" and internal processes, we seek the bridges that enable agency and not only social reproduction, but social invention and transformation.
The course begins with in-depth treatment of the issue of time, memory, and the past as cultural constructs. It surveys works on the relationship to history of collective memory, conmemoration, pageantry, and museums; it questions critiques of the narrativation of the past; it examines nationalist refashionings of the past in the historiographic literature, and in the regional and national history projects of emergent nations and ethnic separatist movements. Attending to the concepts of patrimony and heritage, we will consider the connection between personhood and things, looking at foodstuffs and cuisines, but also the regulation of familial inheritance and the rise of the state (from the sovereign's family patrimony to national patrimony), and query the concept of sovereignty itself. Examining in detail a few of the sites and objects that have been declared patrimony of humanity by UNESCO, we attend to the distinction between tangible and intangible patrimony and the regimes of 'protection' that have accompanied a neoliberal hunger for new kinds of property that has lately engorged itself on "culture".
Recognizing that there can be no time without space, we also focus on the experience of temporality in particular, always spatially defined, contexts. We situate case studies within emerging theorizations of "timespace" that aim to reorient the social sciences away from the Euclidean understandings of space and time to account for social processes in a manner according to post-Einstein cosmologies. We systematically attend to the centrality of narrative—of re-hashings, rehearsals, and anticipations of self-in-relation-to-others across spatial and temporal trajectories linking presentness with past and future—in the shaping of human experience and of personhood itself. We consider forms of embodied public performance as means of ‘surrogating’ the dead to form links among the living, and pay special attention to the poetic forms through which the material world is enchanted to help us recall our pasts. We focus on ghosts, to the haunting of the present by the dead, especially those whose deaths have been caused and covered up by states (the holocaust, Argentina’s dirty war, etc), and on the controversies surrounding the work of truth and reconciliation commissions and the creation of museums of historical memory. Readings range across wide swaths of social theory, but are also deeply grounded in particular cases, places, and times, to develop fruitful approaches to particular ethnographic and historical problems.
LATC-GA 2030.002 – Topics: Guantánamo Public Memory Project at NYU
Day/Time: Tuesday, 2:00pm-5:00pm
Prof. Haidy Geismar
Location: 240 Greene Street, Room 410
Course Description: This course offers a unique opportunity to develop a traveling exhibit, digital projects, and public engagement programs on the history and contemporary implications of Guantánamo. Students will collaborate with 11 universities around the country to develop the Guantánamo Public Memory Project’s National Dialogue and Traveling Exhibit, opening December 13 in the Kimmel Windows Galleries and traveling to 9 other cities across the country over the next two years. Launched by the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, the Project seeks to build public awareness of the history of the US Naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba since 1898 and foster dialogue on the future of this place, it people, and its policies. Since 2001, “Guantánamo” has been an international symbol of America’s “War on Terror,” a lightning rod for deeply divisive debates around torture, detention, national security, and human rights. But GTMO has been an integral part of American politics and policy for more than a century, a keystone of American empire used by Democratic and Republican administrations alike to contain a host of perceived unprecedented threats outside the reach of US laws -- from suspected Cuban spies in the Cold War to Haitian refugees with HIV in the 1990s. What some scholars call a “legal black hole” is nevertheless firmly rooted in the geography and politics of the Caribbean. Students will explore GTMO’s storied past and the challenges of opening dialogue on contested histories in divided societies, through methodologies and case studies from Sites of Conscience around the world. Together with students across the country, they will develop content for the website and traveling exhibit, with opportunities for virtual discussions. In particular, NYU students will create the mechanisms for public engagement that will accompany the exhibit as it travels, designing tours and curating media “catalysts” for dialogue that juxtapose material from the Project’s archive with discussion questions in the urgent questions GTMO’s history raises.
LATC-GA 2145 – Seminar in Latin America: US-Latin American Relations After WWII
Prof. Jorge Castañeda and Columbia University Prof. John Coatsworth
Location: TBA
Course Description: This class will be offered at Columbia (7 weeks) and at NYU (7 weeks). This class will be offered at Columbia (7 weeks) and at NYU (7 weeks). The course seeks to analyze the dynamics and issues that describe relations between the United States and Latin America since the end of World War II. A complete picture of the current state of affairs in the hemisphere and the reasons that led to it require an analysis in three different – but related – dimensions. To cover the first one, the course analyzes historical benchmarks that contextualize particular overt American interventions in the region, dissecting its causes, operation and consequences. In a second dimension, the course looks at topics that have permeated the relationship between the United States and Latin America over this period. Because of their typically cross-national nature, they illustrate a different set of dynamics and concerns that have fueled tensions in the relationship. A third and final dimension concerns recent developments in Latin America that affect and have been affected by U.S. foreign policy. Their novelty suggests that these issues will remain relevant at least in the immediate future.
LATC-GA 2304.001 – Seminar: Queer Colonial Latin America
Day/Time: Tuesday, 2:00pm-4:00pm
Prof. Zeb Tortorici
Location: TBA
Course Description: While the term “queer” has an admittedly anachronistic flair to it, scholars in the past few decades have embarked on diverse projects of queering the early modern Iberian and colonial Latin American pasts. What is at stake in queering colonial Latin American history? What genealogies of desire permit us to consider colonialism in queer terms? How can scholarship force us to rethink heteronormative narratives of history and teleological formulations of desire? This course examines the evolving corpus of scholarly literature that began essentially with two landmark works: Luiz Mott’s 1980 “Pagode português: a subcultura gay em Portugal nos tempos da Inquisição” and Serge Gruzinski’s 1986 “Las cenizas del deseo: Homosexuales novohispanos a mediados del siglo XVII.” In this course we will examine the tensions inherent in such projects as well as the conceptual categories that scholars have employed to analyze gendered identities and corporeal acts in the past. One simply cannot understand the cultural, political, literary, and social history of early Latin America without studying the multiplicity of desires in the colonial past (and the ways in which sexual acts were created, manipulated, and altered). Students will produce a final research paper on a particular aspect of “queer” early modern Iberian or colonial Latin American history, art, literature, theater, ethnography, or filmic representation.
LATC-GA 2652 – Haiti in the Caribbean Context
Day/Time: TBA
Prof. Michael Dash
Location: TBA
Course Description: This course will concentrate on the representation of Haiti, arguably the most distinctive Caribbean country in the region and the second independent republic in the hemisphere, in the imagination of writers from the Americas. It will be as much an introduction to key issues in Haitian politics, history and culture as an investigation of the impact of Haiti on the rest of the hemisphere. The latter aspect of the course will be examined through a number of fictional, anthropological and historical texts that react to Haiti and its revolution. This course explores and interrogates the notion of the “postcolonial” in relation to certain key aspects of contemporary African and/or Caribbean societies, cultures, and histories. Individual areas of investigation include theories of Africa and Africans, Caribbean literary theory, modern postcolonial theory and its applicability and relevance to recent developments in the African continent and its diaspora, new identity formations, African and Caribbean cultural studies, nationalism and the nation-state, creolization, and theories of resistance.
LATC-GA 3050 – Internship Seminar
Day/Time: Friday, 11:00am-1:00pm
Prof. Pamela Calla
Location: TBA
LATC-GA 3200 - Reading and Writing Workshop
Day/Time: TBA
Prof. Sarah Sarzynski
Location: TBA
NYU Courses outside of CLACS
CINE-GT 2117 Brazilian Cinema I
Day/Time: Wednesday, 12:30-4:30pm
Prof. Robert Stam
Location: WS
Course Description: This course is a graduate survey course (but open to advanced undergraduates with background in Brazilian history or culture) devoted to the history of Brazilian Cinema from its beginnings up to the latest features. Although a film course, the approach will be very “cultural studies,” with an emphasis especially on issues of race and multicultural representation. Film will be seen as part of a discursive continuum that includes history, literature, music, and performance. We will move from the silent period, on to the musical comedies (chanchadas) and the studio films of Vera Cruz up to and through the various phases of Cinema Novo, on to the 1990s retomada and the 2lst century. Some of the themes will include: history and representation; carnival and the carnivalesque; multicultural dissonance as artistic resource; subversive aesthetics; the divided city; experimental documentary; literary adaptations; television; the aesthetics of garbage; indigenous media; the Rediscovery of the Favela; and Sexual Politics.
Courses at Columbia University
The following courses are courses from Columbia University’s School of International and Public affairs (SIPA) and are open to all NYU graduate students. Classes are held at Columbia University. Please follow the approved procedures carefully when registering for a Columbia course. These procedures can be found in the Consortium Registration Form. More information about these courses may be found on Columbia University's website. If you have questions, please contact Amalia Cordova in CLACS.
LATC-GA 2532 – Power, State and Law in Latin America
(CU History G8674)
Day/Time: T 11:00am-12:50pm
Prof. Nara Milanich
Location: TBD
LATC-GA 2535 – Music, Myth and Indigeneity
(CU Music G6427)
Day/Time: M 4:10pm-6:00pm
Prof. Ana Maria Ochoa
Location: TBD
LATC-GA 2536 - Politics of Constitutional Change in Latin America
(CU Politics G8403 )
Day/Time: R 6:10pm-8:00pm
Prof. Gabriel NegrettoLocation: TBD
LATC-GA 2537 - Immigration, Cities, States
(CU Sociology G6320)
Day/Time: W 4:10pm-6:00pm
Prof. Saskia J Sassen
Location: Kent Hall
LATC-GA 2538 – State and Society in the Developing World
(CU International Affairs U6412)
Day/Time: W 9:00am-10:50am
Prof. Maria Murillo
Location: TBD
LATC-GA 2539 – Cuba and Latin America
(CU History W4674)
Day/Time: T 4:10pm-6:00pm
Prof. Tanya Harmer
Location: TBD
** graduate students will be required to submit additional work
