This course offers an overview of contemporary Portuguese-Speaking Cultures and Literatures. The time frame covered is from the sixties--years of rupture and experimentalism in artistic and cultural production—to the present. Students will study the concrete poetry of the Portuguese author Ana Hatherly, the visual (“Concrete”) poems of the Brazilian author Haroldo de Campos, and the drawings of the Swiss-Brazilian artist Maria Schendel. The course content will include the multi-layered music of the Angolan duet Ouro Negro and the political essays of Cape Verdean academic Amílcar Cabral. Themes such as colonization, decolonization, freedom, will be among the larger, decidedly compelling group of subjects on which the course will touch.

This course, taught in English, is about dancing bodies, transitioning bodies, bodies in combat, rioting bodies, and more. Its focus is on Brazil and the ways in which Brazilian authors, artists, filmmakers, and activists have discussed the role of bodies in society and culture. On the one hand, Brazil is often associated with sensual and erotic images of naked flesh. These images have often played a role in the commodification of Brazil and Brazilians by tourist agencies and promotional films. On the other hand, Brazilian writers and artists have often pushed back against exotic stereotypes about the nation and focused on the ways in which practices such as samba, carnival and capoeira are historically complex and nuanced expressions of politics and life. This course studies cultural practices in Brazil that invoke the human body, non-human bodies (such as animals and even machines), and the collective political body. The premise of this course is that studying Brazilian culture, in all its diversity and especially its literary traditions, offers a unique lens for considering the ways in which the body can be a site of control as well as radical freedom. No prior knowledge about Brazil or Latin America is required.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills