Travel Writing in Latin America

This course will attempt to foster a better understanding modern Spanish American culture by focusing on its intercultural relationships. For artists and intellectuals in Latin America – Europe, America, Asia, and Africa are at once familiar and exotic cultures. We will frame our readings of texts and images through the lenses of Modernization, World culture, and globalization. Gendered writing, deterritorializating experience, displacements, and resistance will be the main axes of analysis as the course examines certain authors in dialogue with a hegemonic tradition. The corpus will include several types of texts, such as narratives, critical pieces, and autobiographical writings. The texts are organized around two cultural moments: Modernization and Globalization. In the first part of the course, we will discuss colonization, decolonization, and independence in works by Domingo F. Sarmiento, José Martí, Horacio Quiroga, Salvador Novo, Victoria Ocampo, Enrique Gómez Carrillo, and Roberto Arlt. In the second part, we will consider Globalization and new ways to negotiate identities while reading salient contemporary authors like Alan Pauls, Juan Villoro, María Moreno, among others, as well as studying several works of art and movies.