FALL 2009
CORE COURSES
LACS 101 - Introduction to Latin American Studies
Ricardo Gutiérrez-Mouat
TTH 1:00pm - 2:15pm
MAX: 80
Fulfills LACS Major/Minor Requirement
DESCRIPTION: The course is designed as an interdisciplinary introduction to the Latin American region and to the program in Latin American & Caribbean Studies at Emory (LACS). The instructor’s lectures and class discussions will be supplemented with presentations by other Emory faculty involved with LACS so as to maximize the range of approaches to the study of the region. While Latin America has its own historical identity, the region is also part of the global community. The course, therefore, is structured in terms of global issues (such as the environment, terrorism and violence, human rights, women’s rights, reconciliation, immigration, multiculturalism and ethnic diversity, and globalization) and focuses on the specific ways that these themes take root in the Latin American experience. In addition, students will have a chance to volunteer in the Hispanic/Latino community as an integral part of the course.
TEXTS :
Mario Vargas Llosa, The Feast of the Goat
Peter Winn, Americas
Other readings TBA
GRADES: Quizzes and short assignments 15%; Midterm Exam 40%; Final Exam 45%.
SPAN 300WR - Reading in Spanish: Texts and Contexts
Various Faculty
MWF Multiple Sessions
MAX: 10 per session
Fulfills LACS Major/Minor Requirement
DESCRIPTION: A course in Hispanic cultural literacy and critical skills that also develops students' reading ability, vocabulary, and ability to express ideas in writing. The course is designed to give students a broad understanding of Hispanic culture that will prepare them for upper level course work. The primary reading text is Carlos Fuentes' El espejo enterrado. As students read this text, they will learn about the history, geography, values, art, and literature of the Hispanic world. Supplementary texts are also used.
TEXTS :
Carlos Fuentes. El espejo enterrado. 1992
PREREQUISITES: SPANISH 212 or 215, OFFICIAL SPANISH PLACEMENT from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, or permission of the Director of the Language Program.
LAS COURSES
LACS 190 - Doctor Jekyll or Mr. Hyde: Contrasting & Competing Images of the United States
(Same as SPAN 190)
Cristina de la Torre
MW 3:15pm - 4:00pm
MAX : LACS 3; SPAN 15
DESCRIPTION: Ever wonder what people really think about the US? Is it the land of opportunity or the imperialist ogre that tramples over less developed countries? And how are Americans perceived? Do they seem friendly and energetic, or arrogant and self-involved? Find out now by surveying how various peoples have reacted to and portrayed both the country and its citizens throughout the last century and particularly during the recent years. Our goal is to clarify and refine our own notions of the US and of ourselves.
The course is interdisciplinary in nature and includes aspects of history, politics, and culture in various forms of writing—both fiction and non-fiction--as well as documentaries, films, cartoons, and music. We will focus primarily, but not exclusively, on the observations of Hispanics (from Spain, Latin America, as well as immigrants to the US).
PARTICULARS: As a Freshman Seminar, class will consist of dialogue and discussion so that active student participation is essential. We will learn from each other´s observations and experiences with other cultures, carry out interviews, participate in field trips, and examine the cultural assumptions of texts and films. There will be regular writing assignments, short student presentations, student-led discussions, and a final project.
TEXTS:
Course reader
LACS 190 - Visitor Meets Native: Tourism and its encounters with Caribbean Economy, Politics, and Culture
(Same as IDS 190)
Robert Goddard
TTH 2:30pm - 3:45pm
MAX: LACS 10; IDS 10
DESCRIPTION: The Caribbean is the most intensively exploited tourism destination in the world, and yet the significance of the industry to the area is less well understood than comparable experiences such as plantation agriculture, slavery and colonialism. This course will bring together existing research to examine tourism as at one time an economic enterprise and also as a deeply significant cultural experience that has played an under-recognized part in shaping the cultural mores and lifestyles of both the island destinations and the home countries. The course will address such complex and controversial questions as how much does tourism contribute to economic development, especially when sustainability issues are considered; what are the links between tourism and crime, especially drugs and prostitution; and how real are the supposed threats of tourism to national identity. The course will be interdisciplinary in nature, with sources from anthropology, history, literature and popular culture, and will also include selections from music and film.
LACS 263 - Plantation to Postcolonial: A Comparative Survey of Plantation America
(Same as HIST 285, IDS 385)
Robert Goddard
TTH 10:00am - 11:15am
MAX: LACS 10; HIST 5; IDS 5
DESCRIPTION: “Plantation America”, stretching from the American South, through the Caribbean to northern Brazil, comprises a geographical area that, as its name suggests, was dominated by the economic system of plantation monoculture. This course will attempt two inter-related tasks: it will firstly survey the unity and variety of the plantation as a form of socio-economic organization; secondly it will explicate the unity and variety of the political and cultural forms that have evolved alongside the plantation. The course will be interdisciplinary in nature, using texts from history, literature and anthropology.
LACS 270 - Ancient Mesoamerican Art and Architecture
(Same as ARTHIST 225)
Rebecca Stone
MWF 12:50pm - 1:40pm
MAX: LACS 10; ARTHIST 20
DESCRIPTION: This introductory course covers the arts of the indigenous cultures of ancient Mexico and upper Central America from 1500 B.C. – A.D. 1550. Media include architecture, featherwork, textiles, ceramics, sculpture, jade, and metal. Cultures include: West Mexican, Olmec, Teotihuacan, Veracruz, Maya, Toltec, and Aztec, with an emphasis on the Maya and the Aztec. Original works of art in the Michael C. Carlos Museum will be featured.
TEXTS:
Miller, Mary Ellen Miller, Art of Mesoamerica from Olmec to Aztec, 4th edition Miller, Mary Ellen Miller, Maya Art and Architectue
Townsend,
Richard F., The Aztecs
PARTICULARS: Two short papers, three hourly exams.
LACS 385 - History of the
Atlantic Slave Trade
(Same as AFS 389, HIST 385)
David Eltis
TTH2:30pm - 3:45pm
MAX: LACS 7; AFS 7; HIST 385
DESCRIPTION: This course will use the new web site at www.slavevoyages.org
(developed at Emory since 2006) to examine the history of the transatlantic slave trade over 350 years. The focus of the course is to explore the positions and arguments that historians have developed on this subject in the light of the information that is now available.
LACS 385 - Latin American Politics
(Same as POLS 331)
Juan del Aguila
MWF 10:40am - 11:30am
MAX: LAS 10; POLS 35
DESCRIPTION: This course offers a broad interpretation of Latin American politicsand government from developmental and cultural perspectives. Significant issues shaping contemporary politics will also be discussed, namely democratization, neoliberal economic models, human rights and the tension between militarism and democratic legitimacy.
TEXTS:
Charles Blake. Politics in Latin America (2005)
Thomas Skidmore and Peter Smith. Modern Latin America, 6th edition (2005)
PARTICULARS:
Examinations - midterm and final
Papers - one 15-17 page research paper
Grading - midterm 30%, final 40%, paper 30%
Prerequisites - Some background in comparative politics or Latin American Studies is useful.
LACS 490R - All You Need Is Love? The 60s and Global Revolution
(Same as SPAN 460)
Dierdra Reber
TTH 11:30-12:45
MAX: LACS 3; SPAN 15
DESCRIPTION: So you say you still want a revolution? A recent New York Times review of a novel about aging 60s-era radicals takes this question as its title, implying with its exasperated incredulity that the days of revolution are done and gone. Yet the 60s have exploded into our global twenty-first-century field of vision. Amy Winehouse with her huge beehive is the new Brigitte Bardot, Hugo Chávez is the new Fidel Castro, Barack Obama is the new Martin Luther King, Jr., Iraq is the new Vietnam. What cultural need do we have for the 60s in the twenty-first century? Where, when, and why do the 60s turn up? Is our representation of the 60s pure and unadulterated, or have we been giving them a cultural update for twenty-first-century use? The 60s are synonymous with social revolution—are we trying to use them to model radical social change for the twenty-first century, or is their appearance in our global mainstream more about marketing? Can we separate the logic of marketing from our twenty-first-century concept of revolution? We will keep these questions in mind as our interpretive touchstones, taking the role of love in the construction of the revolutionary hero as our principal unit of measurement between then and now as we analyze the 1960s in film, advertising, music, fashion, and politics in the global Americas, North and South. The final weeks of class will be dedicated to the intensive workshop-style development of student presentations and final papers on the 1960s as seen through our own global eyes.
FILMS:
Gillo Pontecorvo, The Battle of Algiers (1966)
Julio García Espinosa, Las aventuras de Juan Quin Quin (1967)
Glauber Rocha, Terra em transe (1967)
Santiago Álvarez, Now! (1965); 79 primaveras (1969)
Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, La hora de los hornos (1968)
Alejandro González Iñárritu, Amores perros (2000)
Fernando Pérez, Suite Habana (2003)
Walter Salles, Diarios de motocicleta (2004); On the Road (2009)
Fernando Solanas, La dignidad de los nadies (2005)
Martin Scorsese, No Direction Home (2005)
Emilio Estevez, Bobby (2006)
Alfonso Cuarón, Children of Men (2006); The Shock Doctrine (2007)
Steven Soderbergh, Che (The Argentine; Guerrilla) (2008)
PARTICULARS: Active participation in class is expected. Weekly short analysis papers (1-2 pp). Depending upon enrollment, final weeks of the class may be dedicated to an intensive writing workshop to develop a research paper on a relevant topic of the student’s choice. Throughout the semester, screenings will be arranged whenever possible according to student preference for scheduling (please note that these screenings will not be part of regular class meetings). Class discussion and writing will be in Spanish.
LACS 490R - Drawing the Line: The Mexico-U.S. frontera and its Stories
(Same as SPAN 460)
Vialla Hartfield-Méndez
MWF 10:40-11:45
MAX: LACS 3; SPAN 9
DESCRIPTION: This course explores the history of the Mexico-U.S. border from colonial notions of boundaries in New Spain through the Mexican-American War and the Mexican Revolution to the twentieth-century concept of "borderlands" and the present cultural and political tangle of migration, fence building, globalization, and multiple borderland spaces, not all of them located at the official dividing line. Through reading (or viewing) and discussing various kinds of texts (crónicas, treaties and other government documents, fiction, poetry, music, visuals arts and film), students will gain a critical understanding of the ideological, political and cultural constructions of la frontera.
TEXTS: May include works by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Gloria Anzaldúa, Carlos Fuentes, Daniel Sada, Humberto Crosthwaite, John Sayles, Juan Rulfo, Francisco Alarcón, Rosario Sanmiguel, José Agustín, Alejandro González Iñárritu. Other sources: Treaties such as the Tratado de Guadalupe, dispatches from Henry Lane Wilson, cartography, official correspondence and other political documents, photography, visual art, corridos and songs from Los Tigres del Norte
PARTICULARS: Attendance and class participation (20%), written reading / viewing responses (20%), two research/writing projects (50%), and a final portfolio (10%).
LACS 490R - Latin American Jewish Experiences in Comparative Perspective
(Same as HIST 489R, JS 490R)
Raanan Rein
M 1:00pm - 4:00pm
MAX: LACS 5; HIST 5; JS 5
DESCRIPTION: Scholarly interest in Jews as a subject of Latin American studies has grown markedly in the last two decades, especially when compared to research on Latin Americans who trace their ancestry to the Middle East, Asia or Eastern Europe. Still, it seems too early to speak of the "normalization" of Latin American Jewish studies. This seminar focuses on Jewish experiences in 20 th century Latin America, emphasizing the national (that is, the Argentine, Brazilian, Mexican, etc.) paradigm, and not the transnational approach. Therefore, we will not solely make comparisons of Jewish experiences in Latin America with Jewish experiences in other parts of the world. Rather we will broaden our analysis to include the experiences of other non-Catholic ethnic minorities on the continent. We might find, for example, that Arabs and Jews have more in common than is usually assumed, both in terms of dominant stereotypes held about them as well as with regard to the patterns of immigration and integration into their new homelands.
TEXTS:
Alfaro-Velcamp, Theresa. So Far from Allah, So Close to Mexico: Middle Eastern Immigrants in Modern Mexico , University of Texas Press 2007
Karam, John. Another Arabesque: Syrian-Lebanese Ethnicity in Neoliberal Brazil, Temple University Press , 2007
Lesser, Jeffrey & Raanan Rein (eds.). Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans, University of New Mexico Press, 2008
Wells, Allen. General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sousa, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009
Zivin, Erin Graff. The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008
Other books and articles on Library Reserves
PARTICULARS: Students are expected to fully participate in all seminar meetings via discussion and a 1-page comment on the weekly readings. Each student will deliver an oral presentation during the term. A research paper or a historiographical essay must be handed in a week before the end of the term. 40% active participation in the discussions and weekly written comments; 10% oral Presentation; 50% Research Paper/Historiographical Essay
LACS 495A– Honors Thesis I
LACS Faculty
No set meeting time
Fulfills Emory College Honors Program requirement
DESCRIPTION: First semester of Honors Program thesis writing for those students participating in the College Honors Program
PREREQUISITES: Enrollment limited to program majors who qualify to participate in the Honors Program.
LACS 495BWR – Honors Thesis II
LACS Faculty
No set meeting time
Fulfills Emory College Honors Program requirement
DESCRIPTION: Second semester of Honors Program thesis writing for those students participating in the College Honors Program.
PREREQUISISTES: Must have completed LAS 495A.
LACS 497R – Independent Research in Latin American and Caribbean Studies
LACS Faculty
No set meeting time
DESCRIPTION: Independent research under the supervision of a LACS faculty member.
PREREQUISISTES: Permission of the Director of Undergraduate Studies.
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