SP 3533: Ecocrítica: Environmental Cultural Production in Latin America

This upper-level Spanish course explores the many ways in which Latin American authors, artists, filmmakers, photographers, and thinkers have responded to environmental concerns from colonial times to present day. Starting with Europeans’ first impressions of the New World, we will grapple with the interplay between local cultures and the expansion of global capitalism in Latin America by analyzing literary and cultural representations of, for instance, resource extraction of rubber, wood, and petroleum in the Amazon (Brazil, Perú, Ecuador); maquiladora contamination and environmental migration in the borderlands (U.S.-Mexico); water defenders and neoliberalism (Chile, Bolivia); indigenous social movements in defense of land & nature (Ecuador); eco-feminist parallels between oppression of women and nature (Honduras, Colombia); and natural disasters, especially in the age of the Anthropocene (Mexico, Puerto Rico). We will explore these issues and more to unearth the role of Latin American cultural production in bearing witness to and generating awareness of environmental crises. While always accounting for the region’s complex and interwoven history of coloniality, inequality, and dependency, we will look for environmental justice solutions proposed at the intersection of art and activism. Several questions will guide our interpretations, which will be grounded in ecocritical theory: what do the studied works aim to achieve by appealing to harmony between the human and the non-human? What similarities or differences exist across countries, contexts, and genres? And how does Latin America’s ecological consciousness differ from that of other peripheries and centers? This course would be especially beneficial to students interested in project work at WPI’s Project Centers in Latin America and the Caribbean and would count toward the HUA Requirement in Spanish, International and Global Studies, and Latin American & Caribbean Studies.
This course will be offered in 2021-22, and in alternating years thereafter.