HISTORY 103E
Artists, Intellectuals, and
Social Change in Latin America
Professor Patrick Iber
Spring 2014 / 2303 Dwinelle / F 2-4PM
Latin American history has featured horrific dictatorships
and turbulent revolutions. In spite of this instability, or perhaps because of
it, the region has also consistently produced one first-class export: the work
of its artists, writers, and intellectuals. This course looks at the myth and
reality of Latin American intellectuals—often said to be more influential
politically than in any other region of the world—over the course of the
region’s modern history. (Gabriel García Márquez once quipped that “In the
history of power in Latin America, there are only military dictatorships or
intellectuals.”) How have Latin American artists and writers used their
cultural production to expose injustice?
When have those attempts made things better, and when worse? By looking at the historical
literature—supplemented with poetry, memoir, painting, and film—this course
will examine the important role of Latin American intellectuals in creating
social change in the region.
Course texts:
Angel Rama, The Lettered City, Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1996, ~$22.
Jorge Coronado, The Andes Imagined: Indigenismo, Society,
and Modernity, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009, ~$27.
Jorge Castañeda, Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara,
New York: Vintage, 1998, ~$15. (Kindle edition available for $12.)
Jorge Edwards, Persona non grata: A Memoir of
Disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution, New York: Nation Books, 2004.
Kindle edition is available for $10, and many used copies for $1 and up.)
David Craven, Art and Revolution in Latin America,
1910-1990, 2nd edition, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2006, $30.
Salman Rushdie, The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey,
New York: Random House, 2008, $14.
Fernando Henrique
Cardoso, The Accidental President of
Brazil, New York: PublicAffairs, 2007, $12.
Presentation: Starting in week 3, our discussion will be led
by a student who has prepared a short presentation of approximately10-15
minutes, drawing out the major questions raised by the week’s readings. Presentations should be practiced and
polished, and end by posing one or two central questions to begin discussion.
For the rest of your grade, you should write approximately
20 pages. You can choose how to
distribute those pages either as a) five short review papers; b) a mixture of review
papers and a shorter final; or c) a long final.
Papers:
- Short review papers of
approximately four pages are to be turned in before class in any week of
the quarter. You are free to write
in the form that you choose, but each paper should be an essay that
relates that week’s reading to at least one of the major themes of the
course: intellectual responsibility, the relationship of events to the
formation of political opinion, or the impact of the intellectual on
politics, etc.
- Whether short or long, I
suggest two formats for final papers but I am open to alternate
plans. The first suggestion is to
find an intellectual or literary review and examine it in its most
important year(s). What was its
project, politically and aesthetically?
What did it expect to achieve its goals? Who contributed to it and why? As a useful exercise, I would encourage
you to do this without
consulting the secondary literature. An alternative final paper structure
would involve writing a short biography of an intellectual of interest to
you.
- All writers who strive to
write good prose would do well to read George Orwell’s “Politics and the
English Language” at least once a year: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
Your grade will be calculated as 20% discussion; 20%
presentation; 60% papers.
Week 1, January 24: The
problems of Latin American intellectuals
To read and discuss in
class:
Charles Kurzman and Lynn
Owens, “The Sociology of Intellectuals,” Annual
Review of Sociology 28 (2002): 63-90.
Week 2, January 31: The
Lettered City
Ángel Rama, The Lettered City
Week 3, February 7: The
making of the modern
Nicola Miller,
“Intellectuals and the Modernizing State in Spanish America,” and “From Ariel to Caliban: Anti-imperialism among
Spanish-American Intellectual,” In the
Shadow of the State: Intellectuals and the Quest for National Identity in
Twentieth-Century Spanish America, pp. 43-94, 174-209
José Enrique Rodó, Ariel, 31-32, 70-101
Mauricio Tenorio, “Stereophonic
Scientific Modernisms: Social Science between Mexico and the United States,
1880s-1930s,” The Journal of American
History 86, no. 3, (Dec. 1999): 1156-1187.
Week 4, February 14: Nation,
State, and Revolution
David Craven, Art and Revolution in Latin America, Introduction
and The Mexican Revolution, pp. 1-73
Helen Delpar, “Mexican
Culture, 1920-1945,” pp. 543-572 from The
Oxford History of Mexico
Deborah Cohn, “The Mexican
Intelligentsia, 1950-1968: Cosmopolitanism, National Identity, and the State,” Mexican Studies / Estudios Mexicanos 21,
no. 1 (Winter 2005): 141-182.
Week 5, February 21: Reinventing
Marxism without a Proletariat
Jorge Coronado, The Andes Imagined
Week 6, February 28:
Theories of Dependency
Joseph Love, “Economic
ideas and ideologies in Latin America since 1930,” from Ideas and Ideologies in Twentieth-Century Latin America, 207-274
Fernando Henrique Cardoso
and Enzo Falletto, Dependency and
Development in Latin America, pp. vii-xxv
André Gunder Frank,
“Foreign Investment in Latin American Underdevelopment,” in Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin
America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil, pp. 281-318
Week 7, March 7: The Cuban
Dilemma
Film in class: Tomás
Gutiérrez Alea, Memories of
Underdevelopment
There is no reading this
week, but next week’s book is long so get started.
Week 8, March 14: Making
heroes into intellectuals
Jorge G. Castañeda, Compañero
March 24-28: SPRING BREAK
Week 9, March 21: The Culture
of Solidarity
Craven, “The Cuban
Revolution,” 75-116
Mario Vargas Llosa,
“Literature is Fire”
Jean Franco, “Liberated
Territories,” from The Decline and Fall
of the Lettered City, 86-117 [available in electronic form through oskicat]
Roberto Fernández Retamar,
“Calibán: Notes Towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America,” in Caliban and Other Essays, 3-45
Week 10, April 4: The Pain
of Solidarity
Jorge Edwards, Persona non grata
Heberto Padilla, Fuera del juego, “En tiempos difíciles,”
“Los poetas cubanos ya no sueñan,” and “Fuera del juego”
Week 11, April 11: Theology
of Liberation
Enrique Dussel, “A note on
liberation theology,” from Ideas and
Ideologies in Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell, 275-285
David Craven, “The Nicaraguan
Revolution,” 117-175
Rushdie, The Jaguar Smile
Week 12, April 18: Socialists
for capitalism
Jean Franco, “Killing them
Softly: The Cold War and Culture,” from The
Decline and Fall of the Lettered City, 21-56 [available in electronic form
through oskicat]
Efraín Kristal, The Temptation of the Word, pp. 69-112
Alma Guillermoprieto, “The
Bitter Education of Vargas Llosa,” in Looking
for History, 155-177
Week 13, April 25: Sociologists
for capitalism
Fernando Henrique Cardoso,
The Accidental President of Brazil
Week 14, May 2:
Conclusions
Jorge Ibargüengoitia, “La
Ley de Herodes,” pp. 19-23
James Petras, “The
Metamorphosis of Latin America’s Intellectuals,” Latin American Perspectives 17, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 102-112.
Jorge Castañeda, “Changing
of the Guard: From Intellectuals to the Grass Roots,” from Utopia Unarmed, 175-202.
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