Figures of the New World: Coloniality...

This course explores the historical development of Latin American cultures since the pre-Columbian era, through the colonial and republican periods, and until the present. It studies how colonialism operates as a historical force in the continent through which distinct worlds come into violent confrontation with one another, beginning with the arrival of the Iberian explorers to the Caribbean in 1492. In this encounter, colonialism progressively unleashes its conquering force, but also gives birth to unprecedented forms of artistic and cultural production in which the latent possibilities and contradictions latent in Latin America are made explicit and problematized.

In particular, the course will focus on the complicated mediations that take place between the Indoamerican cultures and populations of Latin America and the Western world since the so-called "Age of Discovery," giving rise to manifold tensions, prospective "projects," and utopian visions concerning the future of the continent. We will thereby examine how colonialism functions not only as a political or economic process of imperialist expansion, but as a cultural matrix of power that extends and continues well beyond the independence movements that gave birth to the Latin American republics.

Among the questions to be interrogated in the course are: how did the pre-Columbian cultures of Latin America conceive of the world and their political organizations, in contradistinction with the European social, philosophical, artistic, and political models that were imported and imposed during the periods of the Conquest and beyond? How did the colonial-Iberian rule seek to destroy the indigenous past and cultures, while nevertheless triggering modes of subversion and resistance from different agencies that challenged Eurocentric matrix of power? What role does art play in the subversion against colonialism and the coloniality of power? How did the prescient conflict between the indigenous and Western traditions of Latin America continued to evolve during the republican period, becoming subject to manifold artistic, political, and philosophical imaginaries? How did different vectors of indigenista thought pursued the vindication of the native traditions and populations of Latin America within the context of alternative modern futures? And how can we understand the conditions for a decolonial art and politics that does not relapse to new covert modes of Eurocentrism, but also avoids the depoliticizing dangers of cultural relativism?

Among the authors and texts we will be surveying are: the Popol Vuh, Bartolom de las Casas, Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz, Jos Mart, Clorinda Matto de Turner, Jos Crlos Maritegui, Clarice Lispector, Jos Enrique Rod, Jos Vasconcelos, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Rita Segato, Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo.