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.

Taught in English, this course examines different kinds of cultural materials––literature, film, history, etc––from Portugal and its former colonies. The kingdom of Portugal, small compared to its neighbors, was Europe’s first colonial power, establishing trading posts and settler colonies in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean from the start of the fifteenth century and forming the paths of Western colonialism and globalization. By the mid-sixteenth century the Portuguese had erected settlements on all five continents, in the process setting up vast systems of forced enslavement and plantation monoculture. But how did that project come to an end and what are its legacies today? How was colonial power contested? The overall goal for this course is to explore some of the many cultural forms produced in Lusophone, or Portuguese-speaking, nations.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills