SPAN 350 - The United States in the Latin America Imagination

3 Credit(s)

The southern border so jealously guarded by the United States has often proved to be a permeable frontier crossed in both directions by a traffic of people and ideas. The familiar U.S. images of a tropicalized Latin America-“banana republics, “conceptualizations of Latinos as “exotic” or “primitive,” for example-are counteracted in this course by a study of how Latin American intellectuals have represented their northern neighbor since the 19th century. Through the essays, poems, and fictions of writers such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, José Enrique Rodó, José Martí, Rubén Darío, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Rosario Ferré, and others, this course stresses the links between the modern history of the nations of the Western Hemisphere, their cross-cultural contacts, and their literary productions. The goal is to provide an understanding of the political history of the United States, its racial conflicts, its cultural myths, its literature, and its imperialistic interventions from the perspective of the Latin American imagination. This course is taught in Spanish.
Prerequisite(s): SPAN 302 or equivalent.