Becoming Latin America

Becoming Latin America: Universalism and
Regionalism in The New World from the 19th - 21st
Century.
In this course, students shall explore various
theoretical, historical and literary discourses
through which authors
conceived of the complementarity between the local
and global in the attempt to think of the identity
and destiny
of Latin American nations, and of the continent as
a whole. Following and expanding upon the broad
genealogy
drawn by Colombian philosopher and cultural critic
Fernando Zalamea in his groundbreaking study Ariel
y
Arisbe: evolución y evaluación del concepto de
América Latina en el Siglo XX (2000), we trace the
way in which
Latin American thinkers, artists and activists
have sought to simultaneously express the
particularities of their
own worlds, while also thinking of themselves in
light of a geopolitical and global horizon of
cultural production.
Guided by the utopian aspiration to nurture
productive mediations between distinct modes of
expression and
seek new modes of integration between different
cultural forms, we will see how a Latin American "
universalist" tradition emphasized the place of
Latin America in the continuum of Western culture,
within which
the native traditions and unique histories were
integrated into a global horizon across the
sciences, arts, and
politics.

We shall be exploring works by a variety of
authors and artists from the 19th Century and
until the
present, including Andrés Bello, José Enrique
Rodó, Pedro Henriquez Ureña, Clorinda Matto de
Turner, Cesar
Vallejo, Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende, Angel
Rama, Rafael Gutierrez Girardot, Octavio Paz, Rosa
María
Magda, Bruno Bosteels, Claudia Llosa, Chantal
Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, Ciro Guerra, among others.