SPAN 1433 - ECCENTRIC PANORAMA OF PIONEERING WOMEN IN LATIN AMERICA

Minimum Credits: 3
Maximum Credits: 3
Long Description We will study a collection of 20th and 21st century Latin American women, artists and writers who have defended their autonomy by constituting themselves as islands within the Hispanic and secular Catholic patriarchal culture. Our approach will be both cultural and psychological, exploring analytically cases of creative women working in a range of genres. The eccentricity of this panorama is double, not only because Latin American women of genius have had a paradoxical place as a condition of existence in the masculinist social contexts in which they have excelled, but also because our syllabus is a strange set, an eccentric archive of personal styles and projects that have surprised their countries and, sometimes, the world. We will study the painter Frida Kahlo, and the journalist Elena Poniatowska (Mexico), the essayist and theatre writer Elisa Lerner, and the gender-queer painter & poet Blanca Haddad, (Venezuela), the folk music composer Violeta Parra and the filmmaker Maite Alberdi (Chile), the indigenous leader Rigoberta Menchu (Guatemala),the narrator and journalist Mariana Enriquez and the short story writer Silvina Ocampo (Argentina), and the novelist Pilar Quintana (Colombia). To promote the acquisition of Spanish fluency, conversation will be stimulated in a class envisioned as a permanent colloquium, with attentive listening to different voices and psyches that dialogue through protest songs, intimate diaries, testimony, reportage, biographies, lyrical narratives, conceptual artifacts, disruptive performative art, and other reflections on the anomalous daily life of the woman of genius and her struggle for autonomy against a castrating and silencing political power in Latin America.
Academic Career: Undergraduate
Course Component: Lecture
Grade Component: LG/SNC Elective Basis
Course Requirements: PREQ: SPAN 1250
Course Attributes: Undergraduate Research

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