ROMS 4750 - [Knowledge and Power: Literary and Cultural Encounters in the Ibero-Atlantic (1492-2015)]

(crosslisted) SPAN 4745
(HA-AS, HST-AS)

Spring. Not offered: 2023-2024. Next offered: 2024-2025. 3 credits. Student option grading.

Co-meets with ROMS 6750/SPAN 6745.

L. Velloso-Lyons.

This course offers students an engagement with Transatlantic literature through the notion of encounter. While this notion may sound neutral or friendly, it can nonetheless encode violence of many orders. Students will learn about the beginnings of globalization (1492-1700), the independence period (1791-1898), the avant gardes, the Latin American boom, and the 21st century. This course primarily focuses on Latin American literatures, culture, and history, but we will explore it in connection with the cultures and histories of Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. Students will also think critically about the kinds of encounter produced by: forced migration, resistance to colonial oppression, poems in conversation, literary works that challenge strict definitions of genre; intellectual disputes over the rights of telling the history of a people, etc.