Latin American & Latinx Studies (LALS)
LALS 0012 First-Year Seminar: War on Drugs in Latin America
The United States government has spent tens of billions of dollars on policies aimed at reducing the flow of
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: PSCI 0012
1 Course Unit
LALS 0040 First-Year Seminar: Coca and Cocaine
This seminar compares a set of practices that center on coca leaf production in indigenous communities, where coca cultivation has been sustained over long centuries, on the one hand, with a set of unsustainable practices linked to the “drug war” in the Americas, on the other. Participants will read scholarly work in history and anthropology, support one another through a research process, and explore what historians and other scholars might contribute to discussions about drug policy. First-year students only.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: HIST 0040
1 Course Unit
LALS 0091 Sustainable Development and Culture in Latin America
This interdisciplinary course exposes students to the three dimensions of sustainable development -environmental, economic, and social- through an examination of three products -peyote, coca, and coffee- that are crucial in shaping modern identity in areas of Latin America. The course integrates this analysis of sustainable development in relation to cultural sustainability and cultural practices associated with peyote, coca, and coffee and their rich, traditional heritage and place in literature, film, and the arts.
Fall, even numbered years only
Also Offered As: ANTH 0091, ENVS 0053, SPAN 0091
1 Course Unit
LALS 0092 Corona Capitalism: Crisis and Inequality Across the Americas
The coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated existing social inequalities. It has also accelerated the pace of history so sharply that the course of events has become nearly impossible to predict. This CWiC critical speaking seminar takes as its starting point our shared participation in the experience of uncertainty. At the same time, in looking to Latin America and the US, it articulates the fact that COVID-19 is anything but a "great equalizer": its impact varies widely and decisively across race, class, and gender. As the world confronts multiple layers of wreckage, not only biological but also ecological and economic, how can we frame and communicate both uncertainty and truth in a thoughtful way? We will examine social problems that have been laid bare by the pandemic and have since become sites of ethical and political reevaluation, namely health disparities, ecological racism, the distribution of labor, and criminal justice. This seminar's aim is to collaboratively assess one fundamental question: How can we understand COVID-19 not as an exceptional moment in history, but as a crisis of racial capitalism? By studying media, activism, policy, and scholarship produced during the pandemic alongside foundational critical theory, students will gain the analytical tools to contextualize its disproportionate global impact on poor communities and people of color, and to envision a just post-pandemic recovery. We will engage Marxist, feminist, and anti-racist theoretical approaches, and while familiarity with these methods is not necessary, an openness to them is. Self-examination is crucial to the success of the course, which requires students reflect on their own political, intellectual, and emotional investments in racialized inequality. This is a speaking intensive seminar intended to improve students' oral communication and listening skills through class discussions, prepared presentations, and mixed-media communication projects. Conducted in English.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: SPAN 0092
1 Course Unit
LALS 0093 Latinx Environmental Justice
This course explores the involvement of the Latinx environmental justice movement since the 1960s. It addresses theories and concepts of environmental racism and environmental justice, underscoring how Latinx have challenged, expanded, and contributed to the environmental justice discourse. In this course, students will explore national case studies of environmental and racial injustice as they bear on Latinx communities both in rural areas and in urban barrios throughout the United States. The course will analyze these case studies through the lens of Latinx artistic and literary texts (essays, paintings, short stories, documentaries, and short films) as they provide a unique historic and multicultural perspective of the Latinx experience with environmental injustice and of how Latinxs imagine alternative transitions and responses to environmental marginalization. In addition, the works of Latinx artists and writers will serve as case studies to deconstruct racial stereotypes of Latinxs as unconcerned about environmental issues, shedding light on how they share a broad engagement with environmental ideas. The case studies analyzed in this course emphasize race and class differences between farmworkers and urban barrio residents and how they affect their respective struggles. The unit on farmworkers will focus on workplace health issues such as toxic chemicals and collective bargaining contracts. The unit on urban barrios will focus on gentrification, affordable housing, and toxic substances in the home. We will also review current and past programs that have been organized to address the aforementioned problems. This is an Academically Based Community Service Course (ABCS course) through which students will learn from and provide support to a Latinx-serving organization in the City of Philadelphia on preventing exposure to hazardous substances, thus bridging the information gap on environmental justice issues in the Latinx community in Philadelphia. Information dissemination and education efforts will be conducted by collaborating with Esperanza Academy Charter School in Philadelphia to implement lessons on preventing exposure to hazardous substances. Studying environmental justice and pairing it with community service will heighten students' awareness of the complexities of culture, race, gender, and class while providing them with an invaluable experience of cross-cultural understanding.
Spring
Also Offered As: ANTH 0930, ENVS 0054, SPAN 0093, URBS 0093
1 Course Unit
LALS 0115 American Race: A Philadelphia Story (SNF Paideia Program Course)
This course proposes an examination of race with a two-pronged approach: one that broadly links the study of race in the United States with a multi-disciplinary approach and also simultaneously situates specific conversations within the immediate location of Philadelphia, home to the University. The broad historical examination advances key concepts of race and racialization, explores key theoretical methodologies, and highlights major scholarly works. For example, students will engage with the study of race through Africana Studies, Asian American Studies, Urban Studies and through Latin American & Latinx Studies. Readings and methodologies will introduce students to critical issues in education, in literature, in sociology, and with methods in oral history, archival work, and ethnography. Most importantly, this extensive approach highlights the impact of race across multiple communities including Black Americans, immigrant populations, and communities that are marginalized to emphasize connections, relationships, and shared solidarity. Students are intellectually pushed to see the linkages and the impacts of racism across and among all Americans historically and presently. As each theme is introduced a direct example from Philadelphia will be discussed. The combination of the national discourse on race, with an intimate perspective from the City of Philadelphia, engages students both intellectually and civically. The course will be led by Fariha Khan and Fernando Chang-Muy but guest instructors with varied disciplinary backgrounds and guest speakers from local community organizations. Each instructor not only brings specific disciplinary expertise, but also varied community engagement experience.
Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 1115, ANTH 1150, ASAM 0115, SAST 1115, SOCI 2976, URBS 1150
1 Course Unit
LALS 0270 The Immigrant City
This course focuses on immigrant communities in United States cities and suburbs. We survey migration and community experiences among a broad range of ethnic groups in different city and suburban neighborhoods. Class readings, discussions, and visits to Philadelphia neighborhoods explore themes including labor markets, commerce, housing, civil society, racial and ethnic relations, integration, refugee resettlement, and local, state, and national immigration policies. The class introduces students to a variety of social science approaches to studying social groups and neighborhoods, including readings in sociology, geography, anthropology, social history, and political science. Ultimately, the class aims to help students develop: 1) a broad knowledge of immigration and its impacts on U.S. cities and regions; 2) a comparative understanding of diverse migrant and receiving communities; and 3) familiarity with policies and institutions that seek to influence immigration and immigrant communities.
Spring
Also Offered As: SOCI 0270, URBS 0270
1 Course Unit
LALS 0400 Colonial Latin America
The year 1492 was pivotal in the history of the world. It precipitated huge population movements within the Americas and across the Atlantic - a majority of them involuntary as in the case of indigenous and African people who were kidnapped and enslaved. It led to cataclysmic cultural upheavals, including the formation of new cultures in spaces inhabited by people of African, European and indigenous descent. This course explores the processes of destruction and creation in the region known today as Latin America in the period 1400 - 1800. Class readings are primary sources and provide opportunities to learn methods of source analysis in contexts marked by radically asymmetrical power relationships.
Fall
Also Offered As: AFRC 0400, HIST 0400
1 Course Unit
LALS 0450 Modern Latin America 1808-Present
This course examines central themes of Latin American history, from independence to the present. It engages a hemispheric and global approach to understand the economic and social transformations of the region. We will explore the anti-imperial struggles, revolutions, social movements, and global economic crises that have given rise to new national projects for development, or have frustrated the realization of such goals. Taking a historical perspective, we will ask: What triggers imperial breakdown? How did slaves navigate the boundary between freedom and bondage? Was the Mexican Revolution revolutionary? How did the Great Depression lead to the rise of state-led development? In what ways have citizens mobilized for equality, a decent standard of living, and cultural inclusion? And what future paths will the region take given uneasy export markets and current political uncertainty?
Spring
Also Offered As: HIST 0450
1 Course Unit
LALS 0520 Capitalism, (Neo)Colonialism, Racism, and Resistance
This interdisciplinary seminar examines, from an international perspective, theory and artistic productions, including literature, films, and performance art, that analyze and critique capitalism, imperialism and (neo)colonialism, racism, and patriarchy. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 0520, ENGL 0520
1 Course Unit
LALS 0600 The Foundations of the Early Modern Atlantic World 1450-1800
The purpose of this course is to provide students with a solid knowledge of Atlantic history during the early modern period (XV-XVIII centuries). Through readings of primary and secondary texts we will discuss the cultural, religious, intellectual, and economic developments of Europe, Africa, and the Americas, as well as the connections, struggles, and mutual influences between the peoples of these three continents. Throughout the semester we will study several important topics: medieval precedents of early modern expansion; theories of empire; ideologies and systems of conquest and colonialization; the relevance of race and slavery to the understanding of the early modern Atlantic world; how different peoples perceived others and themselves; how European imperialism and colonialization affected the internal development of Africa and America; the role played by religion in the Atlantic world; persistence and continuity of Native cultures and beliefs during an age of expansion; the creation of new identities; the role played by African nations in the creation of the Atlantic world; and the creation of an Atlantic economy.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: HIST 0600
1 Course Unit
LALS 0720 Introduction to Latin American and Latino Studies
Designed to introduce students to the interdisciplinary field of Latin American and Latino Studies, this is a seminar oriented toward first and second year students. Readings will range widely, from scholarly work on the colonial world that followed from and pushed back against the "conquest"; to literary and artistic explorations of Latin American identities; to social scientists' explorations of how Latinos are changing the United States in the current generation.
Spring
Also Offered As: HIST 1702
1 Course Unit
LALS 1060 Race and Ethnic Relations
The course will focus on race and ethnicity in the United States. We begin with a brief history of racial categorization and immigration to the U.S. The course continues by examining a number of topics including racial and ethnic identity, interracial and interethnic friendships and marriage, racial attitudes, mass media images, residential segregation, educational stratification, and labor market outcomes. The course will include discussions of African Americans, Whites, Hispanics, Asian Americans and multiracials.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 1060, ASAM 1510, SOCI 1060, URBS 1060
1 Course Unit
LALS 1090 Urban Sociology
This course is a comprehensive introduction to the sociological study of urban areas. This includes more general topics as the rise of cities and theories urbanism, as well as more specific areas of inquiry, including American urbanism, segregation, urban poverty, suburbanization and sprawl, neighborhoods and crime, and immigrant ghettos. The course will also devote significant attention to globalization and the process of urbanization in less developed counties.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 1090, SOCI 1090, URBS 1090
1 Course Unit
LALS 1103 Dilemmas of Immigration
Beneath the daily headlines about refugees blocked entry, and undocumented migrants deported there is a set of hard questions which deserve closer attention: Should countries have borders? If countries have borders, how should they decide who is kept out and who is allowed in? How many immigrants is 'enough'? Are immigrants equally desirable? What kinds of obligations do immigrants have to their receiving society? What kinds of obligations do host societies have to immigrants? Should there be 'pathways' to citizenship? Can citizenship be earned? Should citizenship be automatic? This course explores these and other dilemmas raised by immigration.
Spring, odd numbered years only
Also Offered As: PSCI 1103
1 Course Unit
LALS 1120 Latin American Politics
This course examines the dynamics of political and economic change in twentieth century Latin America, with the goal of achieving an understanding of contemporary politics in the region. We will analyze topics such as the incorporation of the region to the international economy and the consolidation of oligarchic states (1880s to 1930s), corporatism, populism, and elict pacts (1930s and 1940s), social revolution, democratic breakdown, and military rule (1960s and 1970s), transitions to democracy and human rights advocacy (1980s), makret-oriented reforms (1990s), and the turn to the left of current governments (2000s). The course will draw primarily from the experiences of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile and Mexico. No prior knowledge of the region is required.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: PSCI 1120
1 Course Unit
LALS 1121 U.S. Intervention in Latin America
Why has the United States government participated in regime change in Latin America? How have these interventions affected Latin American political and economic outcomes? How have they helped or hurt U.S. interests in the region? This lecture course provides an introduction to the history and politics of U.S. participation in regime change in Latin America since 1949. For each event, the course will help students understand (1) the goals of the U.S. government; (2) the historical and political context of the intervention; and (3) the outcomes and consequences, both in Latin America and for the United States. One set of short writing assignments will train students to identify the main argument of a reading and assess the quality of the evidence presented in support of that argument; a second set of short writing assignments will train students to make and defend their own argument (see draft syllabus for details).
Spring, odd numbered years only
Also Offered As: PSCI 1121
1 Course Unit
LALS 1160 Caribbean Culture and Politics
This course offers anthropological perspectives on the Caribbean as a geo-political and socio-cultural region, and on contemporary Caribbean diaspora cultures. We will examine how the region's long and diverse colonial history has structured relationships between race, ethnicity, class, gender and power, as well as how people have challenged these structures. As a region in which there have been massive transplantations of peoples and their cultures from Africa, Asia, and Europe, and upon which the United States has exerted considerable influence, we will question the processes by which the meeting and mixing of peoples and cultures has occurred. Course readings include material on the political economy of slavery and the plantation system, family and community life, religious beliefs and practices, gender roles and ideologies, popular culture, and the differing ways national, ethnic, and racial identities are expressed on the islands and throughout the Caribbean diaspora.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 1160, ANTH 1160
1 Course Unit
LALS 1191 The U.S. and the World since 1898
This class examines the emergence of the U.S. as a world power since 1898, and considers both the international and domestic consequences of U.S. foreign relations. In one respect, the twentieth century was a strange time to become a global empire: it was the period when colonial systems centered in Europe, Russia, Japan, and Turkey collapsed, and new nations emerged throughout Africa and Asia. This class explores the changing strategies of military, economic, and political intervention that the U.S. pursued as colonization lost legitimacy. Within that framework, the class invites students to think about several questions: How did the idea and practice of empire change over the twentieth century? How did the United States relate to new visions of independence emerging in Africa, Asia, and Latin America? How did global interactions both inform and reflect racial ideology in the United States? Finally, how did international affairs transform U.S. politics and social movements?
Spring
Also Offered As: HIST 1191
1 Course Unit
LALS 1202 Literature of the Americas to 1900
This course examines U.S. literature and culture in the context of the global history of the Americas. Historical moments informing the course will range from the origins of the Caribbean slave-and-sugar trade at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 and the U.S.-Mexico and Spanish-American wars. Readings will include works by authors such as Frances Calderon de la Barca, Frederick Douglass, Helen Hunt Jackson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Jose Marti, Herman Melville, John Rollin Ridge, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, and Felix Varela. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ENGL 1120
1 Course Unit
LALS 1260 Latinx Literature and Culture
This course offers a broad introduction to the study of Latinx culture. We will examine literature, theater, visual art, and popular cultural forms, including murals, poster art, graffiti, guerrilla urban interventions, novels, poetry, short stories, and film. In each instance, we will study this work within its historical context and with close attention to the ways it illuminates class formation, racialization, and ideologies of gender and sexuality as they shape Latinx experience in the U.S. Topics addressed in the course will include immigration and border policy, revolutionary nationalism and its critique, anti-imperialist thought, Latinx feminisms, queer latinidades, ideology, identity formation, and social movements. While we will address key texts, historical events, and intellectual currents from the late 19th century and early 20th century, the course will focus primarily on literature and art from the 1960s to the present. All texts will be in English.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 2679, COML 1260, ENGL 1260, GSWS 1260
1 Course Unit
LALS 1290 Race and Ethnic Politics
This course examines the role of race and ethnicity in the political discourse through a comparative survey of recent literature on the historical and contemporary political experiences of the four major minority groups (Blacks or African Americans, American Indians, Latinos or Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans). A few of the key topics will include assimilation and acculturation seen in the Asian American community, understanding the political direction of Black America in a pre and post Civil Rights era, and assessing the emergence of Hispanics as the largest minority group and the political impact of this demographic change. Throughout the semester, the course will introduce students to significant minority legislation, political behavior, social movements, litigation/court rulings, media, and various forms of public opinion that have shaped the history of racial and ethnic minority relations in this country. Readings are drawn from books and articles written by contemporary political scientists.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: PSCI 1290
1 Course Unit
LALS 1310 Africa and the Transatlantic Slave Trade
This course focuses on the history of selected African societies from the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. The primary goal is to study the political, economic, social, and cultural history of a number of peoples who participated in the Atlantic slave trade or were touched by it during the era of their involvement. The course is designed to serve as an introduction to the history and culture of African peoples who entered the diaspora during the era of the slave trade. Its audience is students interested in the history of Africa, the African diaspora, and the Atlantic world, as well as those who want to learn about the history of the slave trade. Case studies will include the Yoruba, Akan, and Fon, as well as Senegambian and West-central African peoples.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 1310, HIST 1310
1 Course Unit
LALS 1320 Portuguese for the Professions
Portuguese for the Professions is designed for advanced-level students to develop their ability to use a wide technical vocabulary. The course will cover an array of topics in the areas of Economy, Politics, Science, Technology, Law and others as they pertain to the societies and cultures of the Lusophone countries, with particular emphasis placed on Brazil. Through readings, movies, discussions, essays and presentations, students will enhance their ability to write about and discuss these topics while employing the appropriate technical vocabulary.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: PRTG 1320
Prerequisite: PRTG 1000
1 Course Unit
LALS 1340 Portuguese for the Professions II
Portuguese for the Professions II is a second-semester course designed to provide advanced-level students with exposure to, and practice in, a wide variety of technical vocabulary, and to develop their communicative skills on topics related to Brazil's economic, social and historical context. Classroom activities will be based on the readings and discussions of articles, papers, the viewing of documentaries and other visual media, covering an array of topics within the proposed themes. The course will be conducted in Portuguese.
Fall
Also Offered As: PRTG 1340
Prerequisite: PRTG 1000
1 Course Unit
LALS 1400 Silver and Gold in the Americas from pre-history to the present
Precious metals have shaped pre-Colombian economies and socio-cultural processes in the Americas for thousands of years. After 1492, gold and silver sent from the "New World" to the "Old World" played a key role in changing economies all over the world. Locally, mining centers were places marked by forced labor, conspicuous consumption, and the destruction of ecosystems. Internationally, gold and silver prices have long had outsized effects on monetary and trade policies. This course uses case studies to delve into the fascinating history of precious metals and mining in North and South America. We will analyze documents describing the gold objects ransacked by Spanish conquistadors, examine 17th Century proto-industrial silver mining at Potosi, trace the impact and human cost of the huge gold strikes in Minas Gerais, in colonial Brazil, read new work on the California and Yukon moments of "rush" and their long-term impact on US monetary policy, and follow new reports about the conflicts at the heart of transnational gold mining in the present. Students will gain experience working with primary sources and will produce an in-depth research paper.
Spring
Also Offered As: HIST 1400
1 Course Unit
LALS 1405 Indigenous Latin America 1400-1800
In 1492 Europeans began to colonize the Americas. Many colonizers sought to dispossess Indigenous people of their labor, land, and, sometimes, their lives, and often tried to impose their religion and cultural practices. Nonetheless, throughout Latin America Indigenous communities not only survived but adapted in creative, vigorous ways to the new social and ecological circumstances. In this course we will look at the diverse ways that Indigenous individuals and collectives avoided or adapted to colonial rule in Latin America between 1492 and 1800. We will particularly focus on Arawakan, Carib, Tupinamba, Nahua, and Andean histories. Readings will include both primary and secondary sources.
Also Offered As: HIST 1405
1 Course Unit
LALS 1455 Independence and Revolution in Latin America: Crises and Crossroads
Was it inevitable that the countries in Latin America would become independent, republican nations? What was the impact of revolutions throughout the region from Mexico to Buenos Aires? This course studies the main social, political, economic, and cultural tensions that shook Spanish and Portuguese America during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Through close readings of primary and secondary sources, we will reflect on the meanings and implications of independence and the rise of new republican nations throughout the region. The course is expansive across time and space as we explore topics including the Tupac Amaru Rebellion in Perú, the Comunero Revolt in New Granada, and how the French and Haitian Revolutions, as well as U.S. independence, were perceived throughout Spanish and Portuguese America. We will also delve deeply into the diversity of independence movements. Why did a monarch hold onto power for years after independence was proclaimed in Brazil? How were societies divided during the struggle and who fought on which side? The course culminates with a study of the impact and legacy of independence and revolutions on the region in the mid-19th century and thereafter.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: HIST 1455
1 Course Unit
LALS 1475 History of Brazil: Slavery, Inequality, Development
In the past decade, Brazil has emerged a leading global power. As the world's fifth-largest country, by size and population, and the ninth-largest by GDP, Brazil exerts tremendous influence on international politics and the global economy, seen in its position as an emerging BRIC nation and a regional heavyweight in South America. Brazil is often in the news for its strides in social welfare, leading investments in the Global South, as host of the World Cup and Olympics, and, most recently, for its political instability. It is also a nation of deep contradictions, in which myth of racial democracy -- the longstanding creed that Brazilian society has escaped racial discrimination -- functions alongside pervasive social inequality, state violence, political corruption, and an unforgiving penal system. This course examines six centuries of Brazilian history. It highlights the interplay between global events -- colonialism, slavery and emancipation, capitalism, and democratization -- and the local geographies, popular cultures, and social movements that have shaped this multi-ethnic and expansive nation. In particular, the readings will highlight Brazil's place in Latin America and the Lusophone World, as well as the ways in which Brazil stands as a counterpoint to the United States, especially in terms of the legacy of slavery and race relation. In this lecture, we will also follow the current political and economic crises unfolding in Brazil, at a moment when it has become all the more important to evaluate just how South America's largest nation has shaped and been shaped by global events.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 1475, HIST 1475
1 Course Unit
LALS 1620 The Rise and Fall of the Spanish Empire 1450-1700
This course will provide students with a solid knowledge of the history of early modern Spain (1450-1700). Through readings of primary and secondary texts that offer a complex vision of the cultural, religious, intellectual, and economic contexts and processes, students will be able to appreciate the intricacies of Spain's historical evolution. The course focuses on the rise and decline of the Spanish monarchy: the conditions that enabled Spain to become the most powerful monarchy in early modern times, and the conditions that led to its decline. This course also touches upon other important aspects critical to understanding early modern Spain: relationships among Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Iberian Peninsula; the conquest and colonization of the New World; and early modern debates about Spain's rights to occupy America and the so-called "destruction of the Indies."
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: HIST 1620
1 Course Unit
LALS 1625 Era of Revolutions in the Atlantic World
This class examines the global ramifications of the era of Atlantic revolutions from the 1770s through the 1820s. With a particular focus on French Saint Domingue and Latin America, it provides an overview of key events and individuals from the period. Along the way, it assesses the impact of the American and French revolutions on the breakdown of colonial regimes across the Americas. Students will learn how to think critically about citizenship, constitutional power, and independence movements throughout the Atlantic world. Slavery and the transatlantic slave trade were seriously challenged in places such as Haiti, and the class investigates the appropriation and circulation of revolutionary ideas by enslaved people and other subaltern groups.
Also Offered As: AFRC 1625, HIST 1625
1 Course Unit
LALS 1700 The African Diaspora: Global Dimensions
This class examines the cultural and social ramifications of the African diaspora on a global level. It is divided into two major sections. The first section provides the historical background to the African diaspora by focusing on the forced migration of Africans to Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas. We will then delve into the black experience in French and British colonial spaces. In this section, we will also endeavor to move beyond the Atlantic-centric paradigm in studies of the African diaspora by examining free and unfree migrations of African people across the Indian Ocean to places as far away as India and the Philippines. The second half of the class devotes significant attention to the historical legacy of slavery and colonialism in places like Brazil, Cuba and the United States. In this section, we will discuss such issues as race relations, the struggle for civil rights for African-descent people as well as the emergence and the implementation of affirmative action policies in places like Brazil and the US.
Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 1700, HIST 1700
1 Course Unit
LALS 1740 Capitalism, Socialism, and Crisis in the 20th Century Americas
From the crisis of the Great Depression through the 1970s, the United States and Latin America produced remarkable efforts to remake society and political economy. This course analyzes the Cuban and Guatemalan revolutions, as well as social movements that transformed the United States: the black freedom movement, the labor movement, and changing forms of Latinx politics. In all three countries, Americans looked for ways to reform capitalism or build socialism; address entrenched patterns of racism; define and realize democracy; and achieve national independence. They conceived of these challenges in dramatically different ways. Together, we’ll compare national histories and analyze the relationships between national upheavals.
Fall
Also Offered As: HIST 1740
1 Course Unit
LALS 1800 Perspectives in Brazilian Culture
This course is designed to provide advanced-level students with additional exposure to Portuguese language and culture, as they broaden their knowledge of the Lusophone world and its identity. Classes will focus on discussions and students presentations based on articles, literary texts, and movies or documentaries from, and about, the different regions of the world where Portuguese is spoken. We will start with Portugal and Brazil, and end with Angola and Mozambique, and their cultural expressions. A series of important themes related to the Lusophone world, its history, the dialogues among its different countries, and contemporary challenges will be incorporated in this course as a way to familiarize students with key themes. At the end of this course, students should 1) have developed their oral and written expressions in Portuguese, at the advanced-level, and 2) be able to recognize and discuss important themes, historical figures, and cultural characteristics of the Lusophone world.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: PRTG 1800
Prerequisite: PRTG 1000
1 Course Unit
LALS 1900 Topics in Portuguese, African and Brazilian Cultures
This course explores aspects of Luso-Brazilian culture and film in light of its social context and reception. For current course content, please see department's webpage: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/hispanic-portuguese-studies/pc.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: CIMS 1901, PRTG 1900
1 Course Unit
LALS 2020 International Organizations in Latin America
International Organizations play a powerful role in mitigating conflict at the global level. What role do they play in solving problems related to global politics, economic development, corruption, inequality and civil society in Latin America? How much power, influence and control do they possess in the region? This course examines the role and impact international organizations have had on Latin America since the mid-20th century. After a review of theoretical and methodological persectives on the significance of IOs in international relations, students will examine the workings, issues and often controversies surrounding IOs in Latin America, including the IMF, World Bank, UN, OAS and ICC as wellas regional organizations such as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and area trade blocs and agreements of Mercosur, NAFTA and others. Students will also explore the regional impact of transnational civil society organizations, such as human rights organizations and the International Olympic Committee. Students will be invited to participate in the Washington Model OAS from April 10-17.
Spring
Also Offered As: PSCI 2421
1 Course Unit
LALS 2120 Democracy in Latin America
Since the inception of the twenty first century, Latin America has undergone major economic, social, and political transformations. Many of the neoliberal policies of the last quarter of the twentieth century were reversed or revisited, economic inequality decreased significantly across the region, and anumber of governments turned to the left of the political spectrum, often instituting major public policy and constitutional reforms. How have those changes affected citizenship and democracy in the region? In particular, have citizens' channels for representation and participation changed in the recent past? What has happened to local participatory institutions since the return tothe right in some countries of the region? The course will explore these and related questions. Students will develop their own research projects throughout the semester. While not a requirement, the ability to read Spanish or Portuguese will significantly enhance students' learning experience.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: PSCI 2120
1 Course Unit
LALS 2121 People of the Land: Indigeneity and Politics in Argentina and Chile
This undergraduate seminar compares the evolution of relations between settler colonial nation-states and indigenous peoples and movements throughout the Americas, with a particular focus on the Mapuche people of the Patagonia region, in the south of nowadays Argentina and Chile. The main goal of the course is to comparatively study the organization of indigenous communities and analyze their political demands regarding plurinationality, self-determination, territory, prior consultation, living well, and intercultural education and health care, as well as the different ways in which settler colonial nation-states accommodate or respond to such demands. The course is organized in three parts. The first part of the course studies indigenous rights in international law and in global affairs, particularly in the United Nations, the Organization of American States, and the International Labor Organization. The second part of the course studies indigenous organization, movements, parties, and political representation, in Latin America since the 1990s, when indigenous demands acquired national and international notoriety throughout Latin America. The third part of the course zooms in a comparative analysis of the relationship between the Mapuche (Mapu: land; -che: people) and the formation and evolution of the settler colonial nation-states in Argentina and Chile. Once international travel resumes, the course will have an eight-day travel component. Students will travel to the south of Argentina to visit indigenous Mapuche communities to experience and learn first-hand about their culture, intercultural education and health, recuperation of identity and language practices, different models of economic sustainability, and of territorial claims and arrangements - including co-management between indigenous communities and the National Parks system.
Spring, even numbered years only
Also Offered As: PSCI 2121
1 Course Unit
LALS 2135 Trash: The Dime Novel
This seminar explores the rise of the “dime novel” across the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: ENGL 2135
1 Course Unit
LALS 2145 Reading Maya Culture: Decipherment and a New Window into the Ancient Americas
The past three decades have seen a revolution in the study of the Ancient Americas, one with far-reaching implications for how we understand indigenous society and culture on this continent. This course will take us on a journey of academic discovery—encompassing language, art, and materiality—that explains how the decipherment of a major writing system has revealed a previously hidden world. The Maya are one of the most distinctive and best-known of Mesoamerican peoples, who live today, as they did in ancient times, in the Yucatan Peninsula and a region that spans modern southern Mexico, the whole of Guatemala and Belize, and the westernmost fringes of Honduras and El Salvador. From as early as 1000 BCE they were erecting major architecture and flourished for twenty-five more centuries before the invasion of Europeans brought their independence to an end in the sixteenth century CE. Within their elaborate urban spaces, the Maya erected large stone monuments inscribed with imagery and hieroglyphic texts—most of them commissioned in the Classic Period that reaches from 150-900 CE—although the script is also found on many smaller and more intimate objects. For the first century of research these texts proved all but unintelligible, as faulty assumptions and lack of adequate sources left a deep pessimism that they could ever be understood. But beginning in the 1980s major progress in "cracking the code" took place and today we can read almost all inscriptions to some extent, a decent number in their entirety. This course will teach practical skills that allow students with no previous background to read Maya inscriptions and gain access to the history, politics, religious beliefs, and practical material culture they describe. The fabulous design of the hieroglyphs, that at first seem so impenetrable, will be broken-down to reveal not only language but an iconographic system that reveals much about the ancient Maya aesthetics and visual culture.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ANTH 2145, ARTH 2145
1 Course Unit
LALS 2150 The Ancient Maya: Integrating Material, Text, and Image
Ancient Maya studies is one of the most dynamic and innovative fields in world archaeology today. Emerging as a true historical archaeology only in the past three decades, the decipherment of Maya script now provides a powerful complement and counterpoint to both traditional excavation data and new remote sensing technologies. Equally, the reading of images, and their interaction with texts and artifacts, forms a vital part of our interest in the broader humanistic concerns of worldview and the transcendent--where our primary interest lies in gaining access to past mentalities. This course will provide a comprehensive introduction into current knowledge of the Ancient Maya, with a recurring methodological focus on how different types of evidence are integrated to assemble a persuasive "portrait of the past." This scope of this process is unique in the ancient Americas, since only the Maya offer us the opportunity to read their own descriptions of the world two millennia or more in the past. Geographically, we will be looking at the greater Yucatan Peninsula, which today covers parts of southeastern Mexico, the whole of Guatemala and Belize, and the western extremities of Honduras and El Salvador. Since archaic times (before 1200 BCE) this has been occupied by speakers of the Mayan language group, and millions of people identified as Maya by that means continue to do so today (despite popular notions to the contrary, they have never "disappeared"). No prior knowledge of archaeology or art history is necessary. The course structure is one 3-hour session per week, consisting of a lecture followed by group discussion in seminar-style. Additionally, in Week 6 there will be a virtual tour of the new Mexico and Central American Gallery at Penn Museum. This will introduce the class to the issues of disseminating scholarship and building narratives that are accessible to the wider public.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ANTH 2150, ARTH 2200
1 Course Unit
LALS 2198 Race, Science, and Globalization
Why do racist ideologies persist when a majority of scientists and scholars reject the premises they rely upon? Since the end of WWII, major scientific organizations like UNESCO and the American Anthropological Association have published statements rejecting race as an accurate representation of human biological variation. Yet despite widespread scientific opposition to the validity of race as an object of study, troublesome issues concerning race and racism abound in Western societies. If not an accurate description of human biology then what is race? And is racism an inevitable feature of human societies?
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: HSOC 2198, STSC 2198
1 Course Unit
LALS 2220 Latino/as and the Law
Based in concepts and principles of Constitutional law, this course explores the interpretation and impact of seminal court cases in U.S. history as applied to Latino/as in the United States and abroad. With a particular focus on the 20th century, students will examine how court decisions have affected civil rights, immigration policies, welfare, political incorporation and identity and other important issues affecting Latino/as. Students will also explore additional themes including the status and treatment of Latinos in the criminal justice system, representation of Latino/as in the judiciary, and how Supreme Court decisions have also affected U.S. foreign policy with Latin America. Students will be introduced to a number of guest speakers who are academic experts and practioners in the field.
1 Course Unit
LALS 2238 Modalities of Black Freedom and Escape: Ships
The course circulates around ships and boats. The course combines methods from environmental humanities, visual arts and history to consider multi-modal practices of black freedom and escape. From free black sailors in the eighteenth century Caribbean Sea, to twentieth and twenty-first century West African fishing boats, notions of Haitian “boat people,” Parliament Funkadelic’s mothership, and sinking boats with Somali and Ethiopian migrants off Yemen’s coast, ships have been and remain technologies of containment and freedom for communities of African descent. In the face of environmental vulnerabilities and the reality of water ways as systems of sustenance and imminent death, this course asks: how do black people use the ship and the process and practice of shipping as vessels for freedom, escape, and as a site to experiment with futures? Using the city of Philadelphia and the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers as our primary site of interrogation, the course attends to the threats that black people experience following natural disaster (New Orleans, Haiti, Puerto Rico) and everyday engagement with the local and global state structures regarding water (Flint, MI). In this context, we also look to shipping as a site to theorize and account for black innovation, meanings of (non-)sovereignty, and alternative futures.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 2238, ANTH 2338
1 Course Unit
LALS 2260 Latinx Literature Seminar
This course explores an aspect of Latinx literature intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ENGL 2260
1 Course Unit
LALS 2261 Capitalism, (Neo)Colonialism, Racism, and Resistance
This interdisciplinary seminar examines theory and artistic productions, including literature, films, and performance art, that analyze and critique capitalism, imperialism and (neo)colonialism, racism, and patriarchy. It examines history and culture from an international perspective, giving particular attention to works from the Global South (and from Latin America, especially) as well as works addressing the history of racialized groups within the Global North. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ENGL 2261
1 Course Unit
LALS 2317 The Politics of Matter and the Matter of Politics
What is nature? What is culture? What kinds of practices and actors constitute what we call science? Who and what constitute the sphere we refer to as politics? A number of theoretical developments in cultural anthropology, political theory, critical geography, and feminist science studies have problematized the modernist ontological divide between Nature and Culture and a whole series of binary oppositions (such as objects/subjects, matter/form, bio/geo) that follow from it. Taking inspiration from this literature and placing it in conversation with Native and Indigenous scholarship and a series of contemporary socio-environmental struggles occurring in Latin America and beyond, this course will discuss the conceptual-methodological tools that a concern with politics of matter has generated. The epistemic and political implications of these tools go beyond their analytical usefulness as innovative devices to explore novel phenomena. They complicate well-established fields of inquiry, such as political ecology and economy, environmental studies, ethics, social justice, and modern politics; and, indeed, the singular ontology that these fields may inadvertently and explicitly sustain. We will explore how it is that things, stuff, matter, 'nature' came to fall outside modern politics as such, and the kinds of ethico-political repercussions that problematizing this division may produce.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: ANTH 2317
1 Course Unit
LALS 2320 Educating for Democracy in Latin America and the U.S.
What does it mean to educate for a democracy, and for what type of democracy should we educate for? This course will examine these central questions and others pertaining to citizenship, democracy, and education as it relates to Latin America and Latino/as in the U.S. The course will first examine theoriesof education for democracy comparing and contrasting the works of persons including U.S. progressive-era writer John Dewey, Brazilian scholar Paolo Freire, and Penn President and political scientist Amy Gutmann. The course will delve into a civic and political education curriculum and pedagogies that have beencarried out in institutions, inequality, and culture in the region. The latterpart of the course will examine civic education practices of Latino/as here in the U.S. from primary schools to higher education. This course offers a service-learning component where students will be encouraged to volunteer with educational organizations in the Philadelphia community.
1 Course Unit
LALS 2390 Clarice Lispector
This seminar focuses on the work of Clarice Lispector, the Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and short story writer (1920-1977). See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Also Offered As: COML 2390, ENGL 2390, GSWS 2390, PRTG 0090
1 Course Unit
LALS 2400 Indigenous History of Mexico from the Aztecs to Present
This course will explore the history of indigenous peoples of Mexico from roughly 1400 to the present. Mesoamerica – the cultural region that encompassed what is today Mexico and much of Central America – in the fifteenth century saw the ascendance of the Aztec Empire in central Mexico (and beyond) and the continued independence of numerous Mayan communities. We will begin by looking at a diverse range of sources produced by the linguistically diverse people in these areas, particularly focusing on the “codices,” as the painted deer hide books that recorded history and ritual knowledge are known. Reading sources (in translation) by both European and indigenous languages (primarily Spanish, Nahuatl, and Maya), we will look at the divergent ways that Native communities and individuals responded to Spanish wars of conquest and how they responded to colonialism. The final part of the will look at the impact of Mexican independence and Revolution in the nineteenth century through the present, as well as the ongoing indigenous Mesoamerican diaspora to locales throughout the United States. In addition to written primary and secondary sources, we will consider a diverse array of visual sources – taking advantage of the spectacular holdings of the Penn museum – and contemporary cinema.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: HIST 2400
1 Course Unit
LALS 2401 Indians, Pirates, Rebels and Runaways: Unofficial Histories of the Colonial Caribbean
This seminar considers the early history of the colonial Caribbean, not from the perspective of European colonizing powers but rather from “below.” Beginning with European-indigenous contact in the fifteenth century, and ending with the massive slave revolt that became the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), we will focus on the different ways in which indigenous, African, European and creole men and women experienced European colonization in the Caribbean, as agents, victims and resistors of imperial projects. Each week or so, we will examine the experiences of a different social group and their treatment by historians, as well as anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, and novelists. Along the way, we will pay special attention to the question of primary sources: how can we recover the perspectives of people who rarely left their own accounts? How can we use documents and material objects—many of which were produced by colonial officials and elites—to access the experiences of the indigenous, the enslaved, and the poor? We will have some help approaching these questions from the knowledgeable staff at the Penn Museum, the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, and the Van Pelt Library.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 2401, GSWS 2401, HIST 2401
1 Course Unit
LALS 2402 The Haitian Revolution
In August 1791, enslaved Africans on the northern plain of Saint Domingue (colonial Haiti) rose up in a coordinated attack against their French colonial masters, launching the initial revolt in what would come to be known as the Haitian Revolution. In the years that followed, their actions forced the abolition of racial discrimination and slavery throughout the French Empire. When Napoleon Bonaparte threatened to return slavery to Saint Domingue, they waged a war for independence, declaring Haiti the world's first "Black Republic" in 1804. This seminar will examine some of the major themes and debates surrounding Haiti's colonial and revolutionary history. We will begin by considering the colonial paradox: France's leading role in the intellectual movement called the "Enlightenment" coincided with its ascent as a slaveholding colonial power. The seminar will also explore parallels and points of connection between the revolutionary movements in France and Saint Domingue: how did increasingly radical ideas in France shape events in the Caribbean? Likewise, how did west African traditions and political ideologies influence insurgents and their leaders? And how, in turn, did revolution in the Caribbean impact the revolution in France? Finally, we will ask how the Haitian Revolution influenced ideas about liberty, sovereignty and freedom throughout the Atlantic World. We will read a combination of primary and secondary materials each week. A final research paper will be required of all students.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 2402, HIST 2402
1 Course Unit
LALS 2403 Animal,Vegetable,Mineral:Culture, Tech, & the Columbian Exchange, 1450-1750
In this course we will explore how Native American technologies shaped the early modern Atlantic World in order to understand the role of culture in what is often called the "Columbian Exchange.” Technologies, for the purpose of this course, include animal practices (such as hunting and taming techniques), foraged and domesticated plants (such as maize, potatoes, and annatto), foods (such as cassava and chocolate), drugs (such as tobacco, quinine and coca), textiles (such as hammocks and featherworks), and precious metals and gemstones (such as pearls, emeralds and gold). We will explore technologies' relationships to other aspects of art and culture, and focus particularly on how and why certain technologies - and not others - moved beyond colonial Latin America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We will read intensively in both primary and secondary sources.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: HIST 2403
1 Course Unit
LALS 2450 Coca and Cocaine
This seminar compares practices that center on coca leaf production in indigenous communities, where coca cultivation has been sustained over millennia, on the one hand, with practices linked to the post 1961 “drug war” in the Americas, on the other. Participants will read scholarly work in history and anthropology, support one another through a research process, and explore what historians and other scholars might contribute to discussions about drug policy. Case studies we'll explore include Peruvian Quechua-speakers' ritual use of leaf, the history of Coca-Cola, patterns of violence in Medellín and Northern Mexico, and the evolution of money laundering in 1980-2010. Students will also have the opportunity to define a topic of interest to them and prepare an in-depth literature review.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: HIST 2450
1 Course Unit
LALS 2542 Brazilian Baroque
This lecture course explores the art, architecture, and visual culture of the Portuguese Empire with emphasis on Brazil and its relations with Africa and Asia.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 2542, ARTH 2542, ENGL 2542
1 Course Unit
LALS 2590 Nutritional Anthropology
The course is an introduction to nutritional anthropology, an area of anthropology concerned with human nutrition and food systems in social, cultural and historical contexts. On the one hand, nutritional anthropologists study the significance of the food quest in terms of survival and health. On the other hand, they also know that people eat food for a variety of reasons that may have little, if anything, to do with nutrition, health, or survival. While the availability of food is dependent upon the physical environment, food production systems, and economic resources, food choice and the strategies human groups employ to gain access to and distribute food are deeply embedded in specific cultural patterns, social relationships, and political and economic systems. Thus, nutritional anthropology represents the interface between anthropology and the nutritional sciences, and as such, can provide powerful insights into the interactions of social and biological factors in the context of the nutritional health of individuals and populations. Because food and nutrition are quintessential biocultural issues, the course takes a biocultural approach drawing on perspectives from biological, socio-cultural and political-economic anthropology. Course content will include: a discussion of approaches to nutritional anthropology; basics of human nutrition; food systems, food behaviors and ideas; methods of dietary and nutritional assessment; and a series of case studies addressing causes and consequences to nutritional problems across the world.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ANTH 2590, URBS 2590
1 Course Unit
LALS 2601 The Asian Caribbean
Although Asians have lived in the Americas for centuries, the Asian American community and experience tends to be defined by the post-1965 wave of immigration to the United States. In an effort to correct this narrative this course will explore the histories, experiences, and contributions of some of the forgotten Asians of the Americas. In particular, we will focus on the earlier labor migrations of Chinese and South Asian individuals to the Caribbean and the United States. The experiences of these individuals, who built railroads, cut sugarcane, and replaced African slave labor, complicate our understandings of race today. By examining the legal and social debates surrounding their labor in the 19th century and exploring how their experiences are forgotten and their descendants are rendered invisible today, we will complicate what is Asian America and consider how this history shapes immigration policies today.
Spring
Also Offered As: ASAM 2610, GSWS 2610, SAST 2610
1 Course Unit
LALS 2610 Latinos in the United States
This course presents a broad overview of the Latino population in the United States that focuses on the economic and sociological aspects of Latino immigration and assimilation. Topics to be covered include: construction of Latino identity, the history of U.S. Latino immigration, Latino family patterns and household structure, Latino educational attainment. Latino incorporation into the U.S. labor force, earnings and economic well-being among Latino-origin groups, assimilation and the second generation. The course will stress the importance of understanding Latinos within the overall system of race and ethnic relations in the U.S., as well as in comparison with previous immigration flows, particularly from Europe. We will pay particular attention to the economic impact of Latino immigration on both the U.S. receiving and Latin American sending communities, and the efficacy and future possibilities of U.S. immigration policy. Within all of these diverse topics, we will stress the heterogeneity of the Latino population according to national origin groups (i.e. Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and other Latinos), as well as generational differences between immigrants and the native born.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: SOCI 2610
1 Course Unit
LALS 2650 Sociology of the Climate Emergency
We're in the midst of a climate emergency, with climate change the most pressing problem. We need to transform our social and economic system to avoid the worst. There's still time to do this, while establishing the conditions for us, and our descendants, to live brilliant, stimulating lives. To move forward, we need to supplement natural science with social science. In the course, will ask, how did we get into this ecological crisis? How does climate figure in contemporary politics? How do the climate and water crises intersect with inequalities around the world? How does an ongoing revolution in the energy sector reflect these tendencies, and what is its promise? What are the big competing paradigms for positive, transformative change today? This fresh-person seminar will tackle these vast questions by introducing students to a range of novel social perspectives on the contemporary global environmental crisis - a crisis that is usually otherwise represented in coldly scientific terms or according to cliches about environmentalists.
Also Offered As: SOCI 2650
1 Course Unit
LALS 2660 International Migration
A comprehensive review of theories and research on international migration. The course introduces the basic precepts of neoclassical economics, the new economics of labor migration, segmented labor market theory, world systems theory, social capital theory and the theory of cumulative causation. Readings examine patterns and processes of global migration during the classic age from 1800-1914 as well as during the postwar period from 1945 to the present. The course also covers a history and evaluation of immigration policies around the world, and devotes signification attention to theoretical and empirical perspectives on immigrant adaptation. Within this larger topic, we will also discuss internal migration and urbanization; the relationship between gender and migration; the spatial distribution of immigrants within the United States, immigrant communities, and ethnic enclaves; and the undocumented population in the United States.
Also Offered As: SOCI 2660
1 Course Unit
LALS 2670 Latin American Art
The numerous traditions of Latin American art have been formed from the historical confluence of Indigenous, European, African, and Asian cultural traditions, each one impacting the others. This lecture course serves as an introduction to these hybrid New World art forms and movements by both providing a large chronological sweep (1492-present) and focusing on several specific countries, including Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Peru, and Argentina.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 2670, ARTH 2670
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6670
1 Course Unit
LALS 2680 Contemporary Immigration in the U.S.
While this course will engage immigration issues more broadly, we will centrally focus on questions of immigrant incorporation and the effects of U.S immigration policy. We will start with the broad question of what should be done about the estimated 10.5 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. Then, we will take a deeper look at the ways in which macro-level forces such as our laws and institutions shape the micro-level, everyday lives of undocumented immigrants and those living in mixed-status families. We will pay close attention to the circumstances of young people, including their experiences of exclusion and belonging across social and educational contexts. More specifically, we will examine how these factors might affect young people's development, schooling experiences, academic trajectories and aspirations, assimilation and ethnic identity, family dynamics, civic engagement, and employment.
Also Offered As: SOCI 2680
Mutually Exclusive: SOCI 5680
1 Course Unit
LALS 2709 Pan-Africanism in Global Perspective
This class covers the history of Pan-Africanism from its early inception in the nineteenth century to the present. Pan-Africanism has sparked political struggles and provided a powerful catalyst to artistic endeavors across the globe. The class focuses on the early critiques of the transatlantic slave trade, tracing the development of a unifying sociopolitical movement and the struggle for identity among Africans and African descendants in the diaspora. C. L. R. James posits that people of African descent, no matter where they might live, are linked through ancestral ties to Africa and as victims of structural and historical racism in the West. The class will not only engage with the classics of Pan-Africanism but also explore the movement’s influence through the arts (music, movies, and literature) and politics. To stress Pan-Africanism’s global ramifications, the class pays significant attention to the movement’s impact on Africa and Latin America.
Also Offered As: AFRC 2709, HIST 2709
1 Course Unit
LALS 2710 Inflationary Times: Money, Currency, and Debt in History
What is inflation? What are its causes and consequences? Inflation has become a pressing concern recently, as prices of fuel, food, and consumer goods have ticked upwards at alarming rates. From the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, war in Ukraine, and climate disasters, current inflationary pressures are inseparable from the major events disrupting the global economy. This is as much the case today as it was following the discovery of silver mines in Potosí (Bolivia), the French Revolution, the breakdown of Bretton Woods, or the 1980s debt crises in Latin America. This course explores the economic and social consequences of inflation across history. It also considers the economic models used to explain the rise and fall of prices—and how economists and policy-makers experiment with new formulas when old ones appear obsolete. By exploring inflationary moments in historical perspective, this seminar explores topics like the political and social meanings of money, how to build trust in a new currency, and what governments can do (or tried to do) to correct financial crisis. Students will be asked to explore past moments of financial and economic crises on their own terms, but also to look for how the past can offer lessons for the present.
Also Offered As: HIST 2710
1 Course Unit
LALS 2740 Facing America
This course explores the visual history of race in the United States as both self-fashioning and cultural mythology by examining the ways that conceptions of Native American, Latino, and Asian identity, alongside ideas of Blackness and Whiteness, have combined to create the various cultural ideologies of class, gender, and sexuality that remain evident in historical visual and material culture. We also investigate the ways that these creations have subsequently helped to launch new visual entertainments, including museum spectacles, blackface minstrelsy, and early film, from the colonial period through the 1940s.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 2740, ARTH 2740, CIMS 2740
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6740
1 Course Unit
LALS 2810 Designing a Green New Deal: From Concept to Program
This advanced social science and design seminar is about mobilizing expert knowledge to develop transformative policy ideas to make the Green New Deal come alive. We'll look at cutting edge social science and design scholarship on the problems we're trying to solve, and the successes and failures of past efforts at transformative policy. And we'll focus in particular on the built environment. How might a Green New Deal make the physical changes to our infrastructures, homes, energy landscapes, transportation systems, public recreation amenities, care facilities, and more, in ways that slash carbon emissions, increase resiliency, and abolish inequalities of race, class, gender, and nation? That's not a rhetorical question: in this class, we'll assemble knowledge, get into teams, and come up with concrete proposals.
Also Offered As: SOCI 2810
1 Course Unit
LALS 2820 Theatre and Politics
This course will examine the relationship between theatre and politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. How do theatre artists navigate their artistic and political aims? How do we distinguish between art and propaganda? Throughout the semester we will ask how the unique components of theatre--its poetic structure, engagement with spectators, aesthetics of representation, relationship to reality, and rehearsal process--contribute to its political capacity. Students will read a variety of plays drawn from late twentieth century and contemporary global theatre practice alongside political and aesthetic theory to interrogate the relationship between artistic production, power, and resistance. We will conclude with a consideration of the ways politics is itself a performance, considering how power is supported by theatrical means and how performance functions in resistance movements.
Also Offered As: COML 2820, ENGL 2880, THAR 2820
1 Course Unit
LALS 2860 Latin American and Latinx Theatre and Performance
This course will examine contemporary Latin American and Latinx theatre and performance from a hemispheric perspective. In particular, we will study how Latin American and Latinx artists engage with notions of identity, nation, and geo-political and geo-cultural borders, asking how we might study "national" theatres in an age of transnational globalization. Our consideration of plays, performances, and theoretical texts will situate Latin American and Latinx theatre and performance within the context of its politics, culture, and history.
Also Offered As: COML 2086, ENGL 0490, THAR 2860
1 Course Unit
LALS 2977 Just Futures Seminar I
This seminar analyzes the historical construction of race and ethnicity in the Americas by focusing on the processes of dispossession–of land, bodies, and heritage–that started with the European colonization of the continent. The first part of the class builds a theoretical framework that will allow students to understand the origin of ethnic and racial classifications as acts of symbolic power, and their connections to specific historical conjunctures. The second and main part of the class focuses on the historical processes that resulted in the colonization of the Americas and the global transformations that came from the encounter of people in the “New World” (the development of capitalism, the emergence of settler colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade, and modern liberalism) in order to trace the genealogy of the ethnic and racial classificatory systems that continue to be used today. We will pay particular attention to the transformation of land tenure and labor regimes and how different political economies produced different logics of racialization. The focus of the seminar is in the Americas as a unit, including both North and South America, and the Caribbean, from the 15th century to the present. The readings come from a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, history, political science, settler colonial studies, and law. The last part of the class is organized as a workshop where students will develop their ideas for a final project and discuss student-selected readings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SOCI 2977
1 Course Unit
LALS 2978 Just Futures Seminar II: Health and Healing in Abiayala (the Americas)
Health and Healing in Abiayala (the Americas) will introduce students to ecosocial notions of health, colonialism’s contributions to ill-health, and decolonial action as healing action. Part one of the course introduces general concepts of body, health, and illness in biomedical models. It then pivots to the relational and ecosocial practices of body, health, and wellbeing among many First Peoples of the Abiayala, highlighting “radical relationality.” For many First Peoples, community includes humans, plants, animals, ancestors, and earth beings (such as the land, mountains, rivers, and lakes) that are materially, socially, and spiritually interdependent. These beings work together to maintain a “shared body” through practices of reciprocal care. Part two of the course examines how the shared body has been and is threatened by the colonization of Indigenous lands and bodies through (e.g.) land dispossession, pollution, extractive industry, lack of access to quality education and medical care, forced sterilization, forced removal of children, exploitative economic relations, and political violence. The third part of the course will follow how First Peoples of Abiayala are healing from the physical, social, and spiritual wounds of colonialism through decolonial action. First Peoples are creating their own healing centers and ecological protection agencies, engaging in Land Back movements, in legal and direct-action processes to protect the shared body from extractive industry, and reproductive justice movements. Healing is future oriented, powering the “radical resurgence” of First Peoples. Some questions addressed in this class include, where does the body begin and end? What constitutes personhood? How does continued colonization affected indigenous peoples’ health—and that of all peoples? How do indigenous peoples use ancestral knowledges, relation ethics, and local ecologies to help heal historic and contemporary wounds to power their futures? Is there a political dimension to healing? How do autonomy and self-determination figure into healing and wellbeing?
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ANTH 2978, GSWS 2978, HSOC 2332
1 Course Unit
LALS 3000 Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies Seminar
We need a placeholder for the possibility of an additional fall course.
1 Course Unit
LALS 3020 Diplomacy in the Americas - The Penn Model OAS Program
"Diplomacy in the Americas" an academically based community service course in which students work with Philadelphia and Norristown public school students to explore solutions to critical problems facing the Americas. Entrenched political, economic, and social inequality, combined with environmental degradation, weak institutions, pervasive health epidemics, weapon proliferation, and other issues pose formidable hurdles for strengthening democratic ideals and institutions. The Organization of the American States (OAS), the world's oldest regional organization, is uniquely poised to confront these challenges. "Diplomacy in the Americas" guides students through the process of writing policy resolutions as though the students were Organization of the American States (OAS) diplomats, basing their research and proposals on democracy, development, security, and human rights - the four pillars of the OAS. Students will also read literature about what it means to educate for a democracy and global citizenry, and they will have the opportunity to turn theory into practice by creating and executing curriculum to teach and mentor the high school students through interactive and experiential pedagogies.
Fall
Also Offered As: PSCI 2420
1 Course Unit
LALS 3022 Bodies of Water: Conflicts and Collaborations around Wetlands and Watersheds
In less than half a decade, the idea that "nature" possesses inalienable rights akin to human rights has gone from a strictly theoretical concept to the basis of policy changes in several countries and U.S. municipalities. This seminar will introduce students to current legal, political, ethical, and practical debates about the implementation and impacts of granting "rights to nature" in these different contexts with a particular focus on the rights associated with bodies of water. We will begin by examining how the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) supported citizens of Tamaqua, Pennsylvania to write the world's first local "rights of nature" ordinance. We will then go on to compare the politics of "rights of nature" cases in Ecuador, New Zealand, India, and Colombia paying special attention to the cases of rivers. We will focus on the ways biocentric constitutional moves may transform concepts and understandings of environmental justice and socio-environmental conflicts. In particular, how the recognition of "nature" as a victim of war may transform understandings of violence, and hence, approaches to constructing peace and engaging and reparative and restorative practices within the larger framework of planetary and community efforts to mitigate climate change, deforestation, and the degradation of watersheds and wetlands. Lastly, we will explore the possibilities and tensions between community decision-making, the "rights of nature," and national level policies regarding the intensification of extractive activities and questions of territorial ordinance as they relate to mulitiple bodies of water.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ANTH 3022
1 Course Unit
LALS 3110 Transdisciplinary Environmental Humanities
Emergent transdisciplinary fields, such as the environmental and medical humanities, reflect a growing awareness that responses to contemporary environmental dilemmas require the collaborative work of not only diverse scientists, medical practitioners, and engineers, but also more expansive publics, including artists, urban and rural communities, social scientists, and legal fields. This course is inspired by the need to attend to environmental challenges, and their health, justice, and knowledge production implications, as inherently social concerns. The class is co-taught by faculty from the School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Medicine, and will address the challenges and possibilities of working across disciplinary boundaries, building collaborative affinities, and negotiating frictions between diverse methodologies and epistemological approaches. Dr. Kristina Lyons from the Department of Anthropology brings years of experience collaborating with scientists, small farmers, indigenous communities, lawyers, and judges in Colombia and Chile on watershed restoration projects, soil degradation, toxicity, and the implementation of socio-ecological justice. Dr. Marilyn Howarth is a medical doctor from the Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology of the School of Medicine and has experience engaging the public, legislators and regulators around environmental health issues affecting the quality of air, water, soil and consumer products. Through their different lenses, they will foster interdisciplinary environmental collaboration and scholarship by engaging students in discussions and research that bring together the arts and sciences regarding issues of urban air pollution, soil remediation, deforestation, and water contamination, among other environmental health problems. This class offers a unique opportunity for students from engineering, natural and social sciences, humanities, and the arts to learn to converse and collaborate around pressing socio-environmental and public health issues.
Spring
Also Offered As: ANTH 3110
1 Course Unit
LALS 3158 ¡Huelga! The Farmworker Movement in the United States
This intensive research seminar invites students to explore the history of farmworkers in the United States during the twentieth century. Research will primarily but not necessarily exclusively focus on the west coast, a region in which many archival sources have been digitized. Students may explore a wide variety of topics, including but not limited to: farmworker unions; the relationship between farmworker mobilizations and other movements in the US and abroad; the experiences of workers from the Philippines and Latin America and the role of US imperial and immigration policies in the lives of farmworkers; farmworkers' confrontations with and participation in systems of racism; the Great Depression in rural communities; the history of gender and family in farmworker communities; the history of environment and health; struggles over citizenship and social rights; counter-mobilizations of growers and the right; religion in farmworker communities; legislative and legal strategies to obtain rights denied agricultural workers in federal law; artistic, musical, and cultural production; or the relationship between consumers and the workers who produced their food.
Also Offered As: HIST 3158
1 Course Unit
LALS 3251 Modern Spain: Civil War and Postwar, 1930-1970
This RESEARCH SEMINAR is divided into three parts. Part I centers on the Spanish CIVIL WAR, 1930-1939. The beginnings of the conflict, the main causes and motivations, the debates in the international arena, the main events and ideologies, some of the main characters, personal experiences (men and women) during the war, violence and repression. Part II focuses on the consequences of the Civil War (1939-1970), both from internal and international perspectives - the constitution of the Francoist regime and its internal politics; the repression of political dissidence; the situation of the Francoist regime during WWII and during the Cold War, how political and cultural dissidence started under Franco's regime, the social history of Spain, and the construction of the historical memory of the Civil War. Part III, Research and Writing: this course is designed to model the research and writing process professional historians use, beginning with a paper proposal and bibliography of primary documents and secondary sources. It then proceeds through the various stages of the research process to produce drafts of the essay and finally the finished essay. All written work is for peer review.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: HIST 3251
1 Course Unit
LALS 3260 Dispossession and Territorial Recovery Among Indigenous Peoples in South America
This seminar will focus on contemporary dynamics of dispossession, territorial claims and territorial recovery involving indigenous peoples in South America. Drawing on cases from different countries (particularly from Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Colombia), we will examine, in historical perspective, processes of territorial dispossession, socio-environmental conflicts, collective action, and struggles for territorial recovery and recognition set against the policies of settler colonial nation-states and economic activities that tend to evict people from their lands. More specifically, we will focus on actions carried out by indigenous peoples and movements to fight territorial dispossession, recover and protect their lands. Particular attention will be paid to the period marked by the growing visibility of the indigenous movements in South America, from 1970s to the present. The perspectives and strategies of indigenous peoples and movements regarding their territorial rights and projects of living well will be considered within the broader framework of identity, ethnicity and land issues. In that sense, the course will draw connections to the actions carried out by landless peasants and other groups. By devoting our attention to different contexts through the region, we will be able both to understand specific situations and identify underlying dynamics.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ANTH 2327
1 Course Unit
LALS 3360 The Peopling of the Americas
The peopling of the Americas is a question that has intrigued scholars and laymen for over 500 years. The origin of Native Americans was also a seminal issue during the emergence of American Anthropology as a discipline at the turn of the 20th century, with research on this topic animating current studies of ethnohistory, indigenous archeology, post-colonialism and repatriation. The proposed course will review the scholarship dedicated to describing this long history from an interdisciplinary perspective. It will explore their roots in the expansion of modern humans into Eurasia, evaluate the new archeological and genetic research that has fundamentally altered our understanding of the migration history and diversity of indigenous peoples in the American continents, and examine issues of identity, ethnicity and cultural heritage in contemporary Native populations that extend from this knowledge. The course will further draw on the instructor's fieldwork experience working with indigenous communities in Alaska, Canada, the Lower 48, Mexico and the Caribbean, as well as native Siberians in Russia, where the cultural and biological roots of ancestral Native American populations lie.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ANTH 3360
1 Course Unit
LALS 3377 Race and Medicine in the Global South
Racialized medical provisions under Apartheid in South Africa, theories of racial immunity to malaria in the Philippines and contemporary investigations of caste-based disease risks in India are some of the topics to be covered in this course. From the more straightforward issues of racial discrimination in medicine, to more complex issues of racial immunity or racial susceptibility to disease, medicine and race have been entangled together in multiple ways. More importantly these issues are far from being matters of the past. Genomic medicine and risk society have combined to make race and medicine one of the most potent contemporary issues. Outside the Western World, in the Global South, these issues are further refracted through local cultural, historical and political concerns. This course will take a long-term view of these contemporary issues.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: HSOC 3377
1 Course Unit
LALS 3405 The Conquest of Mexico
The Conquest of Mexico is one of the most famous episodes of global history. Often told as a story of European technological and military superiority, scholarship of the last thirty years has started to change our understanding of what really happened. In the first half of this course we will examine the history of both Spain and Mesoamerica from approximately 1300 to the fateful meeting of the two civilizations in 1519 that led to war in 1520-21. We will ask questions about sources, actors, and intentions such as, should we even call the events “The Conquest of Mexico”? The second half of the course will focus on the first century of Spanish colonial control of what was now called New Spain to roughly 1650. We will ask questions like, how much control did the Spanish have over their Mesoamerican colonies? What role did the Catholic Church play? How did Indigenous people and Africans adapt to living under colonialism? In what ways did the lives of women change? How was the environment impacted? How did epidemic disease alter daily life and communities? And, finally, what role did China and the Philippines play in the maintenance of a Spanish colony in the Americas? Throughout the course we will read translated primary sources produced by both Spaniards and Indigenous people, as well as selections from recently published scholarship. By the end of the course, each student will have written an original historical analysis based on a theme or event discussed with and approved by the instructor.
Also Offered As: HIST 3405
1 Course Unit
LALS 3510 Love, Anger, Madness: History and Silences in Modern Haiti
On the stage of modern world history, Haiti plays the unique role as both the exceptionally victorious and tragic character. This course interrogates archival documents, oral histories, historical texts, and prose created within the nation and her diaspora in order to establish a nuanced image of the projection of Haiti's modern history. Using two classic Haitian texts, Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Love, Anger, Madness (1968) and Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995),this course examines how, why,and to what end Haiti's history and popular narratives about the country have served to construct and dismantle global movements, popular culture, and meanings of race, gender, and citizenship in the Americas. In our historical examination, we will question some of the iconic representations of Haiti through literature that deepen the affective historical profile of Haiti with interrogations of culture, sexuality, political, and media performance. Students will become familiar with the post -colonial history of Haiti and the region, meanings of race, and the production of history. The course is a research and historical methods seminar. Students will conduct archival research and write narratives from primary source material. This course qualifies as a "methods" course for Africana Studies undergraduate majors and minors.
Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 3510, GSWS 3510, HIST 0840
1 Course Unit
LALS 3511 Brazilian Baroque Seminar
This undergraduate lecture explores the art, architecture, and visual culture of the Portuguese Empire with emphasis on Brazil and its relations with Africa and Asia.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 3511, ARTH 3511
1 Course Unit
LALS 3514 Writing Towards Transformation
Writing Towards Transformation is a critical and creative writing workshop focused on developing works across genres that express and elaborate upon current and historical conditions of crisis and injustice. Using guided meditation, critical feedback and healthy, ethical discussion, the students of the class will develop manuscripts of poems, short stories, essays, plays and/or screenplays that in some way articulate their analysis of the present and the past towards a transformative future. We will read essays, manifestos, theater and fiction as well as view films that will hopefully inspire each student to develop texts and scripts of hope. Writers used as models of inspiration will include Gary Indiana, Valerie Solanas, June Jordan, Bertolt Brecht, Cherrie Moraga, Leslie Feinberg and Toni Cade Bambara, among many others. This is a graduate level course open to undergraduates by permission of the instructor.
Also Offered As: ENGL 3514, GSWS 3514
1 Course Unit
LALS 3515 Race, Rights and Rebellion
This course provides an in-depth examination of theories of race and different kinds of social struggles for freedom around the globe. We will critically engage the latest scholarship from a variety of scholars and social movement actors. From anti-slavery revolts to struggles for independence to anti-apartheid movements, this course will emphasize how racialized peoples have employed notions of rights and societal resources grounded in cultural differences. Though much of the readings will highlight the experiences of African descendant peoples in Africa and its diaspora, the course will also explore the intersections of Black struggles with social movements organized by indigenous peoples in the Americas. Students will also have the unique experience of accessing readings primarily written by primarily Black scholars, some of whom have participated as key actors in the social movements they describe. Key concepts include power, resistance, subaltern, hegemony, identity politics, consciousness, and intellectual activism. The course will be organized around the following objectives: 1. To explore a range of contemporary theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches to the study of social movements; 2. To focus on the relationship between race, gender, class, culture, and politics in the African diaspora; 3. To study the historical development of organized struggles, social protests, uprisings, revolutions, insurgencies, and rebellions; 4. To examine the political agency of African descendant peoples in the global struggle for liberation and citizenship.
Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 3515, ANTH 2515, SOCI 2907
1 Course Unit
LALS 3524 Medical Mestizaje: Health and Development in Contemporary Latin America
Latin American nations as we know them today emerged in the nineteenth century after violent independence struggles against the Spanish Empire. Since independence, mestizaje has been an influential ideology that seeks to portray the identity of Latin American nations as comprised of a unique cultural and racial fusion between Amerindian, European, and African peoples. Through historical, anthropological, and STS approaches this course examines how concerns with racial fusion and purity have shaped the design and implementation of public health programmes in Latin America after independence and into the 20th century. Topics include: tropical medicine and race; public health and urbanization; toxicity and exposure in industrialized settings; biomedicine and social control; indigenous health; genomics and health; food and nutrition.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: HSOC 3524
1 Course Unit
LALS 3550 Accordions of the New World
This course focuses on the musical genres and styles (both traditional and popular) that have grown up around the accordion in the New World. We will begin our explorations in Nova Scotia and move toward the Midwest, travelling through the polka belt. From there, our investigation turns toward Louisiana and Texas--toward zydeco, Cajun, and Tex-Mex music. We will then work our way through Central and South America, considering norteno, cumbia, vallenato, tango, chamame, and forro. Our journey will conclude in the Caribbean, where we will spend some time thinking about merengue and rake-n-scrape music. Throughout the semester, the musical case studies will be matched by readings and film that afford ample opportunity to think about the ways that music is bound up in ethnicity, identity, and class. We will also have occasion to think about the accordion as a multiply meaningful instrument that continues to be incorporated into debates over cultural politics and mobilized as part of strategies of representation through the New World. (Formerly Music 157).
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 3550, MUSC 3550
1 Course Unit
LALS 3551 Latin American Cuir/Queer Critique
While certain debates around queer theory and queer studies have emphasized the problematics of a deployment of a North American field to other geopolitical spaces, this course takes a different approach by emphasizing how Latin America expands the notion of queerness while also contributes to the field of queer studies and queer theory at large. As such, the course emphasizes different manifestations of the non-normative from and within Latin America. Paying close attention to aesthetic practices as well as criticism, theory, and activism, students will be exposed to how Latin American literary and cultural practices labor a critique of hegemonic structures of visibility that simultaneously direct our senses to quotidian and communal strategies of survival. Students will engage with aesthetic artifacts, such as film, literature, manifestoes, poetry, performance, music, video and street art, and photography from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Peru.
Also Offered As: GSWS 3550
1 Course Unit
LALS 3560 Fighting the Dispossession of black bodies -The Brazilian Black activism from slavery to the present
The objective of this seminar is to provide to the students an overview of the history of black activism in Brazil. We will examine several forms of racial conflict, focusing on the afro-Brazilian ways of organization. We will explore the main periods and organizations of black activism, such as the abolitionism, the Brazilian Black Front, the Experimental Black Theater, the Black Unified Movement and the Quilombolas' movement. Through this exploration, the classes will investigate the relationship between black organizations, black thinkers and the circulation of black ideas across Americas, Africa, and Europe. We will also examine how the Brazilian black movement has elaborated values of democracy and equality, handling notions of class, race and nationality.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 3561
1 Course Unit
LALS 3570 Caribbean Music and Diaspora
This course considers Caribbean musics within a broad and historical framework.Caribbean musical practices are explored by illustrating the many ways that aesthetics, ritual, communication, religion, and social structure are embodied in and contested through performance. These initial inquiries open onto an investigation of a range of theoretical concepts that become particularly pertinent in Caribbean contexts--concepts such as post-colonialism, migration, ethnicity, hybridity, syncretism, and globalization. Each of these concepts, moreover, will be explored with a view toward understanding its connections to the central analytical paradigm of the course--diaspora. Throughout the course, we will listen to many different styles and repertories of music ranging from calpso to junkanoo, from rumba to merengue, and from dance hall to zouk. We will then work to understand them not only in relation to the readings that frame our discussions but also in relation to our own North-American contexts of music consumption and production. (Formerly Music 258).
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 3570, ANTH 2570, MUSC 3570
1 Course Unit
LALS 3580 Latin American Music
This survey course considers Latin American musics within a broad cultural and historical framework. Latin American musical practices are explored by illustrating the many ways that aesthetics, ritual, communication, religion, and social structure are embodied in and contested through performance. These initial inquiries open onto an investigation of a range of theoretical concepts that become particularly pertinent in Latin American contexts--concepts such as post-colonialism, migration, ethnicity, and globalization. Throughout the course, we will listen to many different styles and repertories of music and then work to understand them not only in relation to the readings that frame our discussions but also in relation to our own, North American contexts of music consumption and production. (Formerly Music 158).
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 3580, MUSC 3580
1 Course Unit
LALS 3602 Cyborgs, Robots, Gadgets: Technologies in Contemporary Hispanic Cinema
Contemporary Latin American and Spanish Cinema offer a great reflection on the role that new technologies have in the film industry, and in our lives, in the digital era. Often, we find that technologies are used in an original way to overcome financial shortages in times of crisis, or when resources are limited. In this context, sometimes it is actually thanks to the new technologies that the work of new directors can be produced or distributed. Some recent Latin American and Spanish sci-fi movies find genuine ways to bring about social and political commentary through the use of technological narratives. Reflections on technology are often found in many other film genres too. Our aim in this course will be to explore the use of technology in film in the present and in the past, as well as to study narratives that place technology at the center. We will focus our study on films where technology is a key factor and will reflect on the impact of technologies in our experience as spectators as well.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: CIMS 3602, SPAN 3602
1 Course Unit
LALS 3650 Latin American Cinema
This course aims to familiarize students with the major achievements and cultural moments of Latin American cinematography. We will cover a broad set of themes, nations and time periods employing multiple theoretical positions.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: CIMS 3650, SPAN 3650
1 Course Unit
LALS 3651 Passion Projects: Radical Experiments in Writing Plays, Screenplays, and Pilots
This creative writing workshop will focus on writing for screen, stage and internet and is open to undergraduate and graduate students at every level of writing experience. The course will be writing intensive and also include the reading and analysis of feminist, trans, queer, working class and racially liberatory plays, films, television and performance as models of inspiration. Meditation, drawing, theater games, improv exercises, screenings and outings to see work on and off campus will round out this holistic and experimental approach to making work that illuminates and entertains audiences from across the US and global audience spectrum.
Also Offered As: ENGL 3651, GSWS 3651
1 Course Unit
LALS 3652 Crossing Borders in Latin American Cinema
Through the lens of border crossing this course will explore various current topics in Contemporary Latin American Cinema such as immigration, exile and travel narratives, gender crossing, social and political transgressions, transnationalism, and co-productions. The concept of the border will be fluid and central to the course, and through it we will reflect upon what separates and unites people at an individual, sexual, social, cultural, political, national, and geographical level. This focus will help us explore a wide variety of “movements”, negotiations, and transgressions taking place in the Latin American Cinema of the last three decades.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: CIMS 3652, SPAN 3652
1 Course Unit
LALS 3682 Staging Gender in Latin America
This course is based on an understanding of theater as a social space and a cultural practice that allows a collectivity--in its most concrete sense, the audience--to think in public about itself and about the fundamental forces facing and shaping it. In this course, we will mainly read contemporary Latin American and Latinx theatrical texts produced by women and queer authors. Our focus will be to discuss how, in the last approximately four decades, the stage as space and performance as practice have been used in Latin America as vehicles to represent and discuss issues related to gender and sexuality, to reconfigure the parameters of these debates, to examine and question existing social structures and attitudes, to propose and rehearse alternative solutions to the problems faced by marginalized subjects, and overall to explore the transformative capabilities of theater. We will also examine how conceptions and representations of gender and sexuality intersect with other identitarian coordinates, such as race, class, and nationality.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SPAN 3682
1 Course Unit
LALS 3684 Theatrical Modernity and Postmodernity in Latin America
This course will focus on the theatrical tradition of Latin America during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In addition to reading some of the most influential playwrights of the region, we will discuss the aesthetic theories and sociohistorical contexts that have shaped contemporary Latin American and Latino theater and performance practices. We will also explore how the stage has served as a space in which to represent, debate, negotiate, and complicate issues related to national, gender, political, and ethnic communities and identities.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SPAN 3684
1 Course Unit
LALS 3700 Abolitionism: A Global History
This class develops a transnational and global approach to the rise of abolitionism in the nineteenth century. In a comparative framework, the class traces the rise of abolitionism in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, examining the suppression of the transatlantic slave trade, the rise of colonialism in Africa, and the growth of forced labor in the wake of transatlantic slave trade. We will deal with key debates in the literature of African, Atlantic and Global histories, including the causes and motivations of abolitionism, the relationship between the suppression of the slave trade and the growth of forced labor in Africa, the historical ties between abolitionism and the early stages of colonialism in Africa, the flow of indentured laborers from Asia to the Americas in the wake of the slave trade. This class is primarily geared towards the production of a research paper. *Depending on the research paper topic, History Majors and Minors can use this course to fulfill the US, Europe, Latin America or Africa requirement.*
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 3700, HIST 3700
1 Course Unit
LALS 3701 Studies in Colonial Latin American Literature and Culture
The colonial period in Latin America spans more than 400 years. In this course, we study the culture of the Spanish-speaking Americas from the moment Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean to the Latin American wars of independence during the 19th century. We analyze the role that religion and race played in the emergence of colonial societies and the development of national revolutionary discourses. We reflect on the tensions between indigenous populations and Spanish settlers and study the literary culture that developed in the New World. Course content may vary. Please see the department website for current course offerings: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/hispanic-portuguese-studies/undergraduate/hispanic-studies
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SPAN 3700
Prerequisite: SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900
1 Course Unit
LALS 3702 Feminism in the Americas
Students in this seminar will choose their own research topic in the history of feminism. With guidance and support each person will produce a twenty-page paper based on intensive work with primary sources. Readings will range across Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. We’ll take a long view, beginning in the sixteenth century, and use an expansive frame. Our purpose will not be to decide who was or wasn’t ‘a feminist’ but instead to try to understand actors within their contexts. Readings include scholarship on Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Sojourner Truth, the struggle for voting rights across national lines, opposition to dictatorship, and organizing against racism and homophobia. *For History Majors and Minors: Geographic requirement fulfilled by this seminar is dependent on research paper topic.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: GSWS 3702, HIST 3702
1 Course Unit
LALS 3704 There Will Be Blood: The Spanish Conquistador in Latin America
Who was the Spanish conquistador? A brave soldier, a devoted religious man or a voracious murderer? An enemy or a benefactor? This course will study the Spanish “conquest” of the so-called New World through the analysis of a variety of cultural artifacts, from early modern chronicles, poems, and paintings, to contemporary literature and film. We will also reflect on the many forms in which Spanish colonialism is still visible in the present in Latin America and the United States.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SPAN 3702
1 Course Unit
LALS 3706 Oral History
From wax cylinders to reel-to-reel to digital video, recording technologies expanded the historical profession dramatically during the twentieth century. We will read some classics, such as Barbara Myerhoff’s Number Our Days and Alessandro Portelli’s Death of Luigi Trastulli, as well as scholarly pieces aimed at working historians. This course centers on methodology—students will learn about ‘best practices’ in the field and will work toward creating an interview record that can be housed in an archive and accessed by other researchers. All students will use digital video and will practice creating accessible links to both video and audio material, although your interviewees may choose an audio format.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: HIST 3706
1 Course Unit
LALS 3713 Singer-songwriters in the Cold War
This research seminar considers the overlapping political worlds of performers like Violeta Parra (b. Chile 1917), Pete Seeger (b. USA 1919), Miriam Makeba (b. South Africa 1932), Vladimir Vysotsky (b. USSR 1938), Gilberto Gil (b. Brazil 1942), Bob Marley (b. Jamaica 1945), Silvio Rodríguez (b. Cuba 1946), Waldemar Bastos (b. Angola 1954), and others. We will have shared readings about youth-identified musicians who brought Leftist politics on stage with them, as well as about the activism of anti-communists and anti-Stalinists in different geographic spaces. Each participant will produce a 15-20 page paper based on primary sources. Throughout the semester, in-class work will be designed to support the research process. Students will work through multiple drafts and share their writing with one another. Faculty members from Music, Comparative Literature, and other departments will be invited as guest speakers, as will folklorists, performers, and members of other Philadelphia-area communities.
Also Offered As: HIST 3713
1 Course Unit
LALS 3730 Studies in Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latinx Literature
Studies in Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latinx Literature is an upper-division seminar taking a literary-studies approach to Latin American cultural production of the 19-21st centuries. Traditions covered may include Spanish American, Brazilian, and U.S. Latinx literature. Course content may vary. Please see the department website for current course offerings: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/hispanic-portuguese-studies/undergraduate/hispanic-studies
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SPAN 3730
Prerequisite: SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900
1 Course Unit
LALS 3732 New Women's Writing in Latin America
Something unprecedented has been happening lately in the Latin American literary market and scene. Women writers in great numbers have been publishing without encountering major constraints or pressures, and their fictional work has been receiving more awards and critical accolades than ever before. Hence, the assertion made by a critic in El País that “the other Latin American Boom is female” (“El otro ‘boom’ latinoamericano es femenino”) merits to be considered and unpacked. For example, compared to their literary precursors, have the 21st-century female authors presented the customary topics of family, motherhood, sexuality, illness, etc. in a radical new way? Which are the social, political, economic, and aesthetic conditions that have given raise to this proliferation of female authors and the wide acceptance of their fictional worlds? How do these conditions differ from the Latin American literary Boom of the 20th century? These are among the questions we will explore.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SPAN 3732
1 Course Unit
LALS 3734 The Boom in Latin American Literature
Why has Latin American narrative of the 1960s and 70s enjoyed such popular and critical success? What distinguishes this literature from that which was written earlier or later or outside Latin America? Who were the major writers of the boom generation, and what unites or separates them? In this course we will consider these questions as we read important works of fiction by authors such as Cortázar, Donoso, Fuentes, GarcÃa Márquez, and Vargas Llosa as well as criticism that sheds light on the phenomenon of the boom.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SPAN 3734
1 Course Unit
LALS 3736 Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Contemporary Latin American Literature
The publication of Cien años de soledad in 1967 was one of the highest moments in 20th century Latin American literature. Behind this masterpiece was the arduous and tireless work of a writer that had been searching for a personal style during almost a decade. This search also has a continental dimension. In García Marquez’s work, readers find the main topics, aesthetic quests, and political conflicts that hold the Latin American imagination, from the “crónicas de conquista” to the artistic vanguard adventures of the middle of the century. His narrative brings together early discussions about magical realism and the literary boom, anthropological inquiries rooted in transculturation and critical regionalism, as well as questions on class, race, and gender. In this course we will read different moments of his work, from his early short stories to some of his major novels. In addition, we will compare his writing to some of their contemporaries’, in order to have a comprehensive idea about the formation of the Latin American contemporary canon.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SPAN 3736
1 Course Unit
LALS 3738 Coming of Age in Latin America
This course examines contemporary narratives of childhood and adolescence from Latin America. These stories critique the forces that shape young people as they attempt to define themselves in societies marked by racial, ethnic, gender, and class divisions. Texts for the course will be drawn from different geographical regions and will include novels, short stories, and films from the second half of the twentieth century through the present.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SPAN 3738
1 Course Unit
LALS 3740 Latin American Non-Fiction
Non-fiction is a narrative mode that presents an account of a subject as fact, but it is a label that began to be used to describe narratives dealing with real events and real people fairly recently. This course studies the boundaries and tensions between facts and fiction in Latin America from a historical perspective. We start by analyzing early modern writing by the Spanish conquistadors: cannibals, human sacrifices, sirens, sea monsters, and El Dorado are just a few subjects that 16th-century “non-fiction” presents as facts. We move then to discuss 19th-century journalism about cosmopolitanism and urban modernization. Technological innovations blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, something that film, narrative journalism, and literary chronicles would exploit thought-out the 20th century. Finally, we study non-fictional narratives in contemporary podcasts and social media.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SPAN 3740
1 Course Unit
LALS 3742 Detectives, Criminals, and Writers in Latin American Fiction
Born as a sub-genre, crime fiction (a denomination which encompasses a wide number of texts: classical detective stories, hard-boiled, true-crimes and the non investigative crime novel) has become one of the most attractive literary forms for writers, and one of the favorites for readers. Because it is built around topics like the crime and the law, the search of the truth and the unstable identity of the subject in mass societies, it has become an ideal vehicle for the expression of the anxieties and fears that dominate the contemporary culture. Its versatility has been used by many Latin-American authors to express the social and political conflicts of the continent, as well as to explore its literary possibilities through formal searches, characterized by parody, meta-literary and auto referential games. The aims of this course are, on the one hand, to offer a panoramic vision of the crime fiction in Latin America through the reading of some representative authors; and, on the other, to explore how they can be can be read from different theoretical approaches.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SPAN 3742
1 Course Unit
LALS 3800 Studies in Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latinx Culture
Studies in Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latinx Culture is an upper-division seminars focusing on significant issues or historical moments in Latin American and Latinx culture. Course content may vary. Please see specific Section Details.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SPAN 3800
Prerequisite: SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900
1 Course Unit
LALS 3802 Rural Modernity in Latin America
This course focuses on literary representations of rural Latin America in the 19th and 20th centuries. While it remains common to understand rural societies as traditional or backward in contrast with the city (considered the true center of modernity), this course approaches rural social orders as sites of modernity and modernization in their own right. We will be primarily concerned with examining how works Latin American literature and film created rural visions of modernity, particularly in relation to land reform, political revolution, and capitalist agriculture. While our principal focus will be literature, we will also consider how other forms such painting, film, and political documents envisioned rural transitions.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SPAN 3802
1 Course Unit
LALS 3804 Mexico: Revolution and Culture
Studies the central role played by cultural production in forging and imagining national revolutionary projects, from the 1910s to the 1970s. Focusing on literature, photography, painting, and film, we will examine the works of figures such as Diego Rivera, José Vasconcellos, Tina Modotti, Sergei Eisenstein, Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, Rosario Castellanos, Nellie Campobello, José Emilio Pacheco, and Carlos Monsiváis, among others.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SPAN 3804
1 Course Unit
LALS 3806 Representations of Dictatorship in Latin America
This course explores the phenomenon of Latin American dictatorship through literature, film, graphic novels, and visual and public art, asking how these different media and genres depict and respond to state violence, censorship, and trauma.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 3806, SPAN 3806
1 Course Unit
LALS 3808 Urban Life in Latin American Literature
Cities exist not just in their geography, but in their spirit, and that spirit is captured in literature. In this course we will read compelling works from Mexico City, Lima, and Buenos Aires that represent life in these Latin American capitals at different points between 1950 and the present. As we explore fiction and non-fiction writing by both established authors and emerging writers, we will learn about the forces and events that have shaped narratives of the urban experience in Latin America.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SPAN 3808
1 Course Unit
LALS 3810 Jungle Narratives: la selva
The Amazon evokes opposing images. It has been described alternately as paradise lost and green hell, a place to retreat from the restraints of civilization or to be devoured by savage men and beasts, a land of natural abundance and environmental degradation. Our objective in this course is not to determine which of these descriptions is most accurate, but to understand how these opposing visions were created and what they aim to communicate. As we explore the Amazon through works of fiction we will gain an appreciation of the problems and promise of the region as well as greater knowledge of important authors, themes, and techniques of Latin American literature.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SPAN 3810
1 Course Unit
LALS 3812 Afro-Latin America: Culture, History, and Society.
A transnational and interdisciplinary examination of the black experience in Latin America and the Spanish, French and English-speaking Caribbean, since slavery to the present. Combining cultural analysis with the study of fundamental theoretical works on race and racialization, students will gain a thorough comprehension of historical, political and sociocultural processes shaping the existence of Afro-descendants in the Americas. The scrutiny of systemic racial exclusion and marginalization will allow the understanding of how these dividing practices condition cultural production.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 3812, SPAN 3812
1 Course Unit
LALS 3814 The Caribbean and Its Diaspora: Culture, History, and Society
A thorough panorama of contemporary Caribbean societies and their diasporic communities, this course enhances the students' knowledge of the region's main historical, political, and sociocultural trends. We will examine Caribbean multiple narratives of survival and resilience within a global context, through the study of 20th and 21st-centuries literary, cinematographic, musical, visual and performative works. The cultural analysis will be supported by a theoretical framework encompassing critical Caribbean theories on identity and identification.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 3814, SPAN 3814
1 Course Unit
LALS 3820 Rel & Pol in Latin Amer
This course offers an introductory examination of the political and social role that the Catholic Church has played in Latin America from the time of the Spanish and Portuguese conquests in the 16th century to the end of the 20th century. Throughout this five-century period, the Catholic Church has not acted as a monolithic institution. Some members of the church have been associated with governments and those in power in order to exert control and domination over the population. Others have been among the few individuals or institutions that have spoken up against the injustices and oppression both of colonial governments in the 16th to 18th centuries, and of authoritarian regimes of independent republics in the 19th and 20th centuries. In this latter period, our analysis will include the churchs role in defending human, civil, political, and indigenous rights and in promoting the transition from the period of military or civilian dictatorships that ruled a good part of the region starting in the 1960s to civilian democratic regimes in the 1980s and 1990s. We will analyze six countries, three of which were under national security regimes: Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, and three others that experienced internal wars between guerrillas and military-backed civilian juntas: Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
LALS 3840 Cuban Visual Culture
This course will focus on the urban history and cultural politics of contemporary Cuba with an emphasis on contemporary art and contemporary developments in the city of Havana. Students will learn about the Spanish influence on early colonial art, the development of formal academic art training and the changes to art instruction and the form and content of art created since the Revolution.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 3840, ARTH 3840
1 Course Unit
LALS 3902 What Is Mexico? Questioning Mexican Icons
This course studies Mexico through many lenses. From history to art, from anthropology to pop culture, from literature to film, our primary objective is to question current and past iconicity to develop a more complex and nuanced understanding of Mexican history and culture.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SPAN 3902
1 Course Unit
LALS 3904 Latin American Marxisms
This course examines Marxist thought in Latin America, from the early twentieth century to the present. We will study a range of materials from across Spanish America, including essays, novels, films and speeches. We will ask after the specificities of Latin American Marxist thought (on the land and indigenous questions, dependency, guerrilla warfare, etc), at the same time as we contextualize those specificities within a wider Marxist tradition. We will also inquire into the waning and resurgence of Marxism in recent decades in the region.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SPAN 3904
1 Course Unit
LALS 3906 The Ethnographer in Latin American Literature and Film
This course asks students to read ethnographic accounts as literature and to read literature in light of interdisciplinary concerns surrounding representation and cultural difference. The course is transhistorical and transatlantic but with a strong focus on Latin America.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SPAN 3906
1 Course Unit
LALS 3908 Body and Soul: Hispanic Perspectives on Health, Illness, and Healthcare
TBD
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SPAN 3908
1 Course Unit
LALS 3910 Sustainable Development And Culture in Latin America
This interdisciplinary course exposes students to the three dimensions of sustainable development -environmental, economic, and social- through an examination of three products -peyote, coca, and coffee- that are crucial in shaping modern identity in areas of Latin America. The course integrates this analysis of sustainable development in relation to cultural sustainability and cultural practices associated with peyote, coca, and coffee and their rich, traditional heritage and place in literature, film, and the arts. This is an upper level seminar open to majors and minors of Spanish and those who have completed Pre-requiste SPAN 1800 or SPAN 1900 or permission of the Undergraduate Chair.
Fall, even numbered years only
Also Offered As: ENVS 3053, SPAN 3910
Prerequisite: SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900
1 Course Unit
LALS 3912 Labor in Contemporary Latin American Literature and Film
This course studies different forms of cultural production (film, novel, short story, critical essay) as entry-points into new settings and conditions for work in Latin America, in four sectors that have become especially salient in the region: services, finance, agro-industry and the informal economy (particularly drug trafficking). We will pay particular attention to how cultural production allows us to envision the coordinates of the larger, indeed global, economy into which workers are inserted. We will examine how cultural production allows us to map shifting class structures; we will also track how gender and race shape national and international divisions of labor.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 3912, SPAN 3912
1 Course Unit
LALS 3914 Madness and Women in Contemporary Hispanic Culture
The first goal of this course is to examine different “cases” of mental disturbances suffered by women in Hispanic cultures as they have been depicted in novels, short stories and films in the last 50 years. We will study "cases" of female madness precipitated by maternity, domesticity, sexuality, creativity, historical events, and biculturalism. Secondly, we will focus on the “causes” psychoanalysts, authors and literary critics have proposed for those mental illnesses. Additional readings on a wide range of disciplines --feminism, literary theory, psychology and psychoanalysis-- will enhance our understanding of the works selected for the course and will help us identify their political and ideological underpinnings.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SPAN 3914
1 Course Unit
LALS 3916 Contemporary Latin American and Latinx Cultural Production
This course provides an insightful understanding of the main aesthetic, socioeconomic, political and cultural dynamics at play in the 20th and 21st centuries Latin American societies and Latinx communities in the United States. Combining the analysis of literary, cinematic, musical, visual and performative works with theoretical readings, students will discuss issues on national, racial, gender and sexual identifications; pervasive inequalities, the impact of globalization and new technologies; migration, violence, terror, revolutions, dictatorships, the Cold War, and the implementation and effects of Neoliberalism.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SPAN 3916
1 Course Unit
LALS 3930 Latinx Environmental Justice
This course explores the involvement of the Latinx environmental justice movement since the 1960s. It addresses theories and concepts of environmental racism and environmental justice, underscoring how Latinx have challenged, expanded, and contributed to the environmental justice discourse. In this course, students will explore national case studies of environmental and racial injustice as they bear on Latinx communities both in rural areas and in urban barrios throughout the United States. The course will analyze these case studies through the lens of Latinx artistic and literary texts (essays, paintings, short stories, documentaries, and short films) as they provide a unique historic and multicultural perspective of the Latinx experience with environmental injustice and of how Latinxs imagine alternative transitions and responses to environmental marginalization. In addition, the works of Latinx artists and writers will serve as case studies to deconstruct racial stereotypes of Latinxs as unconcerned about environmental issues, shedding light on how they share a broad engagement with environmental ideas. The case studies analyzed in this course emphasize race and class differences between farmworkers and urban barrio residents and how they affect their respective struggles. The unit on farmworkers will focus on workplace health issues such as toxic chemicals and collective bargaining contracts. The unit on urban barrios will focus on gentrification, affordable housing, and toxic substances in the home. We will also review current and past programs that have been organized to address the aforementioned problems. This is an Academically Based Community Service Course (ABCS course) through which students will learn from and provide support to a Latinx-serving organization in the City of Philadelphia on preventing exposure to hazardous substances, thus bridging the information gap on environmental justice issues in the Latinx community in Philadelphia. Information dissemination and education efforts will be conducted by collaborating with Esperanza Academy Charter School in Philadelphia to implement lessons on preventing exposure to hazardous substances. Studying environmental justice and pairing it with community service will heighten students' awareness of the complexities of culture, race, gender, and class while providing them with an invaluable experience of cross-cultural understanding.
Spring
Also Offered As: ANTH 3930, ENVS 3445, SPAN 3930, URBS 3930
Prerequisite: SPAN 1800 AND SPAN 1900
1 Course Unit
LALS 3999 Independent Study
Individual research to be taken under the direction of a faculty member. Students wishing to do an independent study should contact the Latin American and Latino Studies program.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
LALS 4020 U.S.- Latin American Relations
Why has and does foreign policy between the U.S. and Latin America matter? Why is there a historical legacy of tension, violence, and limits to the friendship between the US and its neighbors to the south? How do historical perspectives help us understand contemporary inter-American relations? How do theories of neocolonialism, neorealism, and neoliberal institutionalism inform discussion, debate and understanding between the North and the South? To what extent and in what way do global trends influence inter-American affairs? The course explores answers to all of these questions through the analysis of historical and current events of the US-Latin America relationship and develops students’ critical thinking through their insertion into debates that reflect alternative perspectives.
1 Course Unit
LALS 4240 Latinx Communities and the Role of CBO's in Social Change
The purpose of this course to create a Latino Studies/Service Learning ABCS course that cultivates dialogue and knowledge about the social, political, cultural and historical complexities of the Latinx experience in the United States (Philadelphia in particular) and the roles Latinx CBO's play in meeting the needs of Latinx communities and in impacting social change.
Fall
Also Offered As: SOCI 2931
1 Course Unit
LALS 4250 Latinx Cultural History
This course takes a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of the resiliency and impact of Latinx cultural and artistic contributions, esthetics, expressions and institution building int he United Stats from the Civil Rights Era to the present. We will explore how Latinxs arguculturally defining being "American"; how their artistic expressions fit and influence the creativity and productivity of American and global Arts & Cultural expressions; and the Latinx interactions of race, culture, society, economy and politics in the U.S.
Also Offered As: SOCI 2932
1 Course Unit
LALS 4387 Black Feminist Approaches to History and Memory
Topics vary: Black Feminist Approaches to History & Memory - The term black feminism emerged in public discourse amid the social, political, and cultural turbulence of the 1960s. The roots of black feminism, however, are much older, easily reaching back to the work of black women abolitionists and social critics of the nineteenth century. The concept continued to grow and evolve in the work of twentieth century black women writers, journalists, activists, and educators as they sought to document black women's lives. Collectively, their work established black feminism as a political practice dedicated to the equality of all people. More recently, black feminism has been deployed as a tool for theoretical and scholarly analysis that is characterized by an understanding that race, class, gender, and sexuality are inextricably interconnected. Using materials such as slave narratives, social criticism, and archival sources, this course will explore the theoretical and practical applications of black feminist thought in nineteenth and twentieth century North American culture and politics. In particular, we will consider the symbols and practices (storytelling, myth-making, art, archival research) that black women use to document lives. We will ask: how do these methods of documentation inform our understanding of the past and the production of historical knowledge? How can we understand black feminism as both theory and practice? And what are the implications of black feminist approaches for current research and scholarship? We will give particular attention to concepts such as gender, race, memory, the archive, and embodied knowledge to complicate our understanding of historical documentation, epistemology, and authenticity. The course material will include scholarship by Harriet Jacobs, Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, Hazel Carby, Hershini Young, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Toni Morrison, and others. (Image: From In Praise of Shadows, Kara Walker (2009). See the Africana Studies Department's website at https://africana.sas.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 4387, GSWS 4387, HIST 0817
1 Course Unit
LALS 4517 One Series--Love and Rockets: The Great American Comic Book
This One Series course explores Love and Rockets, an anthology comic book series created by the collective known as Los Bros Hernandez and published continuously since 1978. We will approach the series through the lenses of Comics Studies and Latinx Studies. Is it true, as one scholar says, that, “Love and Rockets is the closest thing we have to ‘The Great American Comic Book?’” How does the series continue or challenge the legacy of the underground comix movement of the 1960s and 1970s? We will consider how Love and Rockets incorporates elements of the anarchist LA punk scene, challenges notions of Latinidad, and expands the visual vernacular of gender & sexuality in American comics. Alongside two representative volumes from Love and Rockets, we will read criticism, watch documentaries, incorporate our own comics research, and write comics of our own. Assignments will include brief research exercises and short writing in various forms. For the final projects, students will have the choice of a critical essay or creative project. Students will come away from the class with increased visual literacy as well as a basic theoretical framework for ethnic studies writ large.
Also Offered As: ENGL 4517
1 Course Unit
LALS 4650 Race and Racism in the Contemporary World
This undergraduate seminar is for advanced undergraduates seeking to make sense of the upsurge in racist activism, combined with authoritarian populism and neo-fascist mobilization in many parts of the world. Contemporary manifestations of the phenomena noted above will be examined in a comparative and historical perspective to identify patterns and anomalies across various multiple nation-states. France, The United States, Britain, and Italy will be the countries examined.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 4650, PSCI 4190
1 Course Unit
LALS 4910 The Inclusive City: Participatory Design at Taller Puertorriqueno
The Inclusive City: Participatory Design at Taller Puertorriqueno seminar will provide students in and beyond the Architecture department with the opportunity to learn from and with Taller Puertorriqueno about community, spacemaking, and memorialization in the built environment. Students will learn about a neighborhood and engage in collaborative participatory design, engaging primary sources in the Taller archives, and working on a collaborative design project. Starting from a general (region-urban) to particular (neighborhood) methodology research on site across several categories, and engaging primary sources in the Taller archives, the students will generate relational territorial cartographies and mappings, allowing them to develop a master architectural plan that includes urban strategies, as well as dynamic processes of community development. As a truly interdisciplinary course, students will utilize design concepts, historical methods, and ethnoracial lenses of analysis to collaborate with Taller Puertorriqueno to develop targeted architectural solutions that align with the organization's programmatic goals.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 4920, HIST 0874, URBS 4910
1 Course Unit
LALS 5000 CLALS Seminar 1
This is a placeholder for a possible CLALS course.
1 Course Unit
LALS 5001 Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies Seminar
This is a placeholder for a possible fall course.
1 Course Unit
LALS 5010 Norte, Desierto, Frontera: Countertopographies of the NAFTA Era
Analyzing Mexican, Central American, and Chicanx cultural production, this course examines the uneven reconfiguration of the U.S.-Mexico borderland in the era of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Drawing from critical geography, migration and border studies, and the environmental humanities, we consider how different cultural artifacts have imagined, projected, and challenged the political and socioeconomic boundaries of the Americas. Likewise, we consider how trans-border bodies, spaces and species can help us interrogate the history of the nation-state as well as the social, emotional, and economic toll experienced on both sides of the border from the early 1990s onward. Interdisciplinary in methods and scope, this course strives to develop an understanding of how cultural production responds to and, at the same time, participates in the process of the production of social space. Particularly, we consider how the production of desert and border as sites of socio-ecological devastation prefigures a new paradigm in the relationship between the environment, migration, and the global circulation of capital. Special attention is given to demographic trends and new patterns of forced migration that arose in the aftermath of the so-called Mexican “War on Drugs” (2006). Assignments include presentations, discussion facilitation, and a seminar paper. Alongside readings and class discussions, students will work as a group on a digital timeline/story map using a platform of their choosing (StoryMapJS, ArcGIS StoryMaps, etc.) The goal is to create an annotated cartography of North America’s recent history. The class is structured around four units, each refers to a particular concept that specifies the relation between spatial literary studies and the regional integration of North America: 1. North. Focusing on the entanglements between industrial agriculture and the rise of the maquila industry, we ask how labor and labor relations across the U.S.-Mexico border evolved during the last decade of the 20th century. We consider how urbanization and patterns of residential differentiation affected populations on both sides of the border, while allowing for the consolidation of Northern Mexican and Chicanx identities. 2. Desert. Moving beyond the city as a spatial referent, we consider how the representation of the desert biome in contemporary Mexican and Central American narratives refracts the increased use of violence as a stabilizing agent for capital accumulation. We consider the novel’s ecological imagination and the valences of form to think through the ecological crisis associated with the urban climateric. 3. Border. Studying how neoextractivism intersects with new patterns of international forced migration, we analyze changes in public space, gender, and ethnic identities derived from the contemporary proliferation of borders (political, economic, geographical). We consider the role cultural production plays in the changing border and migration regimes across the Americas. 4. Countertopographies. Finally, we study how memorialization, nostalgia, and loss in contemporary Mexican, Central American, and Chicanx cultural production become spatial vectors that extend the sense of belonging in geographical form. We consider how literary form delineates a countertopography to NAFTA’s ideal of globalization.
Fall
Also Offered As: SPAN 5010
1 Course Unit
LALS 5020 Brujas and Blackness: Transnational Feminist Perspectives of AfroLatinidad
Blackness and brujería are taboo topics within Latinx communities; both typically connote negative imagery and are actively avoided. Recently, the bruja identity has been reclaimed by many AfroLatinx women who see it as an outward expression of their AfroLatinidad and source of personal empowerment. Lara (2005) describes this as a bruja positionality – “the re-membering, revising, and constructing of knowledge as well as participation in other forms of social change…built on healing the internalized desconocimientos that demonize la Bruja and the transgressive spirituality and sexuality that she represents” (p 13). Latinx spiritual practices such as espiritismo, Santeria, Palo Monte, among others, will become avenues through which will explore key themes in Black/Latina/Chicana feminisms, including the politics of representation, stigmatization, multiple forms of state and interpersonal violence, intersecting forms of oppression, economic justice, reproductive justice, queerness/sexuality/lesbianism, and strategies of empowerment and resistance. Through a variety of course materials – academic articles, personal reflections, performance, and art – we will critically examine the construction of Afro-indigenous feminist identities within the contexts of Latin America and the diaspora.
Fall, Spring, and Summer Terms
Also Offered As: AFRC 5020, GSWS 5020
1 Course Unit
LALS 5030 Race in Latin America
In this course, we will examine historical, scholarly and community narratives about race and racialized communities in Latin America. Course texts and discussions will center Black and Indigenous histories and contemporary identities across the region. Our journey this semester will span from the pre-Columbian era to the present day, and will cover multiple Latin American geographies: the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. While we will focus most closely on the Spanish-speaking populations, we will also incorporate texts and discussion about populations speaking other languages in the region (Portuguese, French, Quechua, Kreyól, and English, for example). Finally, the diasporas of Latin America, particularly in the United States, will also figure in the discussions as sites of Latin American convergence, community and interaction in which race functions in various ways. As such, we will engage with a wide range of texts including books, articles (scholarly and popular), video, primary sources, and interviews.
Also Offered As: AFRC 5030
1 Course Unit
LALS 5050 Women and Urban Struggles in Latin America
In Latin America, 80% of the population lives in a city. As many of these cities enter the worldwide competition for attracting networks and capitals—and to join the select club of the so-called global cities—many city residents become progressively dispossessed and excluded to the peripheries, where urban services are rarely adequate. Power relations of class, race, and gender play an essential role in how dispossession is orchestrated in the city and experienced by its residents. This course focuses on how women, specifically, find ways to “endure” in the cities of Latin America, exploring different cases of urban struggles led by women. Across the region, many have been pointing out the extraordinary leadership of women in a wide variety of political struggles - from occupying public places, to denouncing the disappearance of loved ones, and to community organizing that helps build necessary infrastructure in their neighborhoods. Women are also at the forefront of environmental and ecological transformations, leading initiatives to green their city through urban agriculture, reforestation, recycling, and compost projects. Addressed through a holistic approach to caring, these initiatives are embedded in broader struggles for housing, security, and wellness, specifically in the urban peripheries. The contingency of these projects is, at their core, multifaceted: they are typically part of women’s implication in popular education, artivism, and human rights defense. During this course, we will explore and analyze how the specific urban contexts of Latin America affect women and their political subjectivities and how, through their struggles, they play an essential role in re-shaping their cities.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: GSWS 5050, URBS 5050
1 Course Unit
LALS 5100 Inner Outer Space Travel Writing: A Creative Writing Workshop
Inner Outer Space Travel Writing is a creative writing workshop focused on writing work within the science fiction/speculative fiction/alternative futurities, science/land/travel writing, and creative-critical nonfiction traditions. Students will work within a variety of genres, with an emphasis on the essay, the short story, screen/tele-play, play, blog and performance. Students will read recommended texts from within their particular interests, and the course will culminate in both a public performance and dissemination/publication via another media platform (zine, website, podcast, etc). All levels of experience, from none/first-time writer to published writers, are encouraged to register for the course.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: GSWS 5100
1 Course Unit
LALS 5110 Ethics, Archaeology, and Cultural Heritage
This seminar will explore some of the most important issues that are now a central part of archaeological, anthropological and historical research throughout the world. The identification and control of cultural heritage is a central part of the framework for research within other communities. Issues for this course will also include cultural identity, human rights, repatriation, colonialism, working with communities and many other topics. Field research today must be based upon a new series of ethical standards that will be discussed and examined within this class. Major topics include: cultural heritage - definitions and constructs, cosmopolitanism and collecting, archaeology and looting, cultural heritage preservation, museums - universal and national, museum acquisition policies, cultural identity, international conventions (including underwater issues), national laws of ownership, community based development, cultural tourism, development models, and human rights.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ANTH 5110
1 Course Unit
LALS 5120 Latin American Politics
This graduate level course will be embedded in course PSCI/LALS 213. In other words, graduate students taking this course will have to attend lectures twice a week, but instead of discussing materials in recitations will meet with the professor either weekly (one hour) or biweekly (two hours), to discuss the main topics of the course and research questions and proposals related to the course.
Fall
Also Offered As: PSCI 5120
1 Course Unit
LALS 5121 Passion Projects: Radical Experiments in Writing Plays, Screenplays, and Pilots
This creative writing workshop will focus on writing for screen, stage and internet and is open to undergraduate and graduate students at every level of writing experience. The course will be writing intensive and also include the reading and analysis of feminist, trans, queer, working class and racially liberatory plays, films, television and performance as models of inspiration. Meditation, drawing, theater games, improv exercises, screenings and outings to see work on and off campus will round out this holistic and experimental approach to making work that illuminates and entertains audiences from across the US and global audience spectrum.
Also Offered As: GSWS 5120
1 Course Unit
LALS 5140 Writing Towards Transformation
Writing Towards Transformation is a critical and creative writing workshop focused on developing works across genres that express and elaborate upon current and historical conditions of crisis and injustice. Using guided meditation, critical feedback and healthy, ethical discussion, the students of the class will develop manuscripts of poems, short stories, essays, plays and/or screenplays that in some way articulate their analysis of the present and the past towards a transformative future. We will read essays, manifestos, theater and fiction as well as view films that will hopefully inspire each student to develop texts and scripts of hope. Writers used as models of inspiration will include Gary Indiana, Valerie Solanas, June Jordan, Bertolt Brecht, Cherrie Moraga, Leslie Feinberg and Toni Cade Bambara, among many others. This is a graduate level course open to undergraduates by permission of the instructor.
Also Offered As: GSWS 5140
1 Course Unit
LALS 5220 Transitional Justice in Latin America
Latin America, a region where many countries transitioned to democracy since the mid-20th century or emerged from years of civil war, often serves as a model for transitional justice, the process of dealing with past human rights abuses. This online class explores the nature, history, and context of transitional justice across the region through class dialogue on film, case studies, first-hand accounts, and scholarly research. Engaging in comparative analyses of countries including Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Guatemala, El Salvador, Peru and Colombia, students will consider such topics as the extent to which countries have moved from impunity to accountability for previous human rights violations, the effectiveness of transitional justice mechanisms, such as trials versus truth commissions, and the theoretical, empirical, and historical arguments for transitional justice. Finally, students will learn about transitional justice models and processes worldwide, including the case of South Africa and the workings of the International Criminal Court, and analyze them according to the Latin American examples.
1 Course Unit
LALS 5240 Latinxs and the Law
Based in concepts and principles of Constitutional law and critical race theory, this course explores the interpretation and impact of seminal court cases in U.S. history as applied to Latinxs in the United States and abroad. With a particular focus on the 20th century, students will examine how court decisions have affected civil rights, immigration policies, welfare, political incorporation, education, and other important issues affecting Latinxs. Students will also explore additional themes including the status and treatment of Latinxs in the criminal justice system, representation of Latinxs in the judiciary and how Supreme Court decisions have affected U.S. foreign policy with Latin America.
Summer Term
1 Course Unit
LALS 5270 Market Women, Madames, Mistresses and Mother Superior
Market Women, Madames, Mistresses & Mother Superior studies gender, labor, sexuality, and race in the Caribbean. In our historical examination of primary source documents alongside literature, and popular media, we will question some of the iconic representations of Caribbean and Latin American women in order to understand the meaning, purpose and usages of these women s bodies as objects of praise, possession, obsession and/or ridicule by communities, governments and religions within and outside of the region. Beginning in the late-18th century and ending with contemporary migration narratives, this course considers the relationship between slave society and colonial pasts on gender performance in the modern Caribbean, Latin America, and their diasporas.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: AFRC 5270, GSWS 5270
1 Course Unit
LALS 5300 Latin American Sexual Movements
This course explores significant sexual movements in Latin America that destabilized the idea of nation formation and its frames of citizenship. From the 1960s and on, we will analyze and study homosexual, lesbian, and feminist irruptions of contestation from Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and U.S. and how their interruption in the social, public, and political sphere changed sexual and reproductive rights.
Summer Term
Also Offered As: GSWS 5300
1 Course Unit
LALS 5420 Parallel Plagues: Infectious Diseases and their Control in Peru and The United States
Infectious agents continue to emerge, killing and harming humans and animals with unrelenting regularity. The emergence and control of these agents are, in some ways, remarkably different in different geographies. In other ways the patterns and consequences of infectious agents are very similar. The course will be structured around a series of pairings of infectious disease problems that affect Peru and the United States. Some pairings will be in terms of the agents themselves; others will be more thematic. In each case we will trace two lines of inquiry, one in each country, but always with an eye to the harmonics--where these lines resonate--even if they do not interact. The primary goal of the course is to investigate the historical, political and economic forces driving infectious disease in Peru and the US. A co-primary goal is to bring students and faculty from Penn and our partner institutions in Peru, Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, to work their way through topics in infectious disease control, which are inherently challenging. The course will be taught in English but a workable knowledge of Spanish will be helpful.
Fall
Also Offered As: PUBH 5420
1 Course Unit
LALS 5430 Migration, Displacement, and Education
This course examines the effects of migration (forced and voluntary) on education in a variety of contexts across the world (including the United States). The course reviews sociological and anthropological theories of immigrant incorporation and inclusion. Such frameworks are then applied to migration through case studies of im/migrants, refugees, and displaced persons in order to consider educational practices, programs and policies that address the effects of migration and displacement on education in diverse contexts.
Fall
Also Offered As: EDUC 5430
1 Course Unit
LALS 5570 Archaeology of Landscapes
Traditionally, archaeological research has focused on the "site" or "sites." Regional investigation tends to stress settlement pattern and settlement system determined through archaeological site survey. This seminar will stress the space between the sites or "points" on the landscape. Most previous attempts at "landscape archaeology" tended to focus on the relationship of sites and the natural environment. This course will highlight the cultural, "anthropogenic," or "built environment"--in this case human modification and transformation of the natural landscape in the form of pathways, roads, causeways, monuments, walls, agricultural fields and their boundaries, gardens, astronomical and calendrical alignments, and water distribution networks. Features will be examined in terms of the "social logic" or formal patterning of cultural space. These can provide insights into indigenous structures such as measurement systems, land tenure, social organization, engineering, cosmology, calendars, astronomy, cognition, and ritual practices. Landscapes are also the medium for understanding everyday life, experience, movement, memory, identity, time, and historical ecology. Ethnographic, ethnohistorical, and archaeological case studies will be investigated from both the Old and New Worlds.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AAMW 5570, ANTH 5570
1 Course Unit
LALS 5640 Poverty, Race and Health
This course is designed to introduce students to current literature on race/ethnic difference in health and mortality in the United States, covering such topics as explanations for why some race/ethnic groups fare better than others, how inner city poverty and residential segregation may contribute to racial/ethnic differences in health outcomes, and health of immigrants versus native-born populations. Current policy debated and recent policy developments related to health are also briefly discussed. The course is organized as a seminar with a combination of lectures and class discussions.
Also Offered As: SOCI 5640
1 Course Unit
LALS 5680 Contemporary Immigration in the U.S.
While this course will engage immigration issues more broadly, we will centrally focus on questions of immigrant incorporation and the effects of U.S immigration policy. We will start with the broad question of what should be done about the estimated 10.5 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. Then, we will take a deeper look at the ways in which macro-level forces such as our laws and institutions shape the micro-level, everyday lives of undocumented immigrants and those living in mixed-status families. We will pay close attention to the circumstances of young people, including their experiences of exclusion and belonging across social and educational contexts. More specifically, we will examine how these factors might affect young people's development, schooling experiences, academic trajectories and aspirations, assimilation and ethnic identity, family dynamics, civic engagement, and employment.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: SOCI 5680
Mutually Exclusive: LALS 2680, SOCI 2680
1 Course Unit
LALS 5791 Globalism and National Identity in the Americas
This course examines the way that issues of universal, global, and national identity have been negotiated and challenged in art and visual culture of the Americas. It also aims to give students an introduction to the various theories and methodological practices that have been used to critique and explain these images and objects since the end of WWII. This course is open to graduate students and undergraduate students with permission of the instructor.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 5791, ARTH 5791, GSWS 5791
1 Course Unit
LALS 5792 Biography and Art History
Beginning with the ancient Greeks, people have created specific biographical structures as a way to understand and explain the artistic process. Artists have often been labeled as natural prodigies possessing creative powers on par with the divine. This seminar will examine the role that biography plays in the assessment of visual art and the creative process over time and across European and American culture. During the semester we will read art historical texts, watch biographical films, and debate the historical and post-structuralist critical theory that has helped to shape the current cultural construction of the artist. Throughout the seminar we will discuss the underlying debates around these various approaches to biography. This course is open to graduate students and undergraduate students with permission of the instructor.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 5792, ARTH 5792, CIMS 5792, GSWS 5792
1 Course Unit
LALS 5830 Art, Sex and the Sixties
With a distinct emphasis on performance, film, installation art, video and painting, this course explores the explosion of body-based, nude and erotic work from the 1950 to the 1970s, with particular focus on the 1960s. And it seeks to explore this dynamic not only within the familiar confines of North America and Europe but within Latin America and Asia, too, in what was a nearly simultaneous international emergence of the erotic as a political force in the art world. Reading a range of key voices from Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse, to performance artists Carolee Schneemann and Yoko Ono, Neo-Freudian theorist Norman O. Brown and Brazilian theorist and poet Oswald de Andrade, we will examine how and why sexuality became a privileged form of politics at this historical juncture in a range of different contexts across the globe. We will pay particular attention to how and why an art about sex became a camouflaged form of political dissidence in the confines of repressive political dictatorships, as were then rising in Brazil, Argentina. and ultimately Chile. Students interested in feminist, gender or queer theory, Latin American Studies, social revolution, performance studies, post war art and Frankfurt School thought should find the course particularly appealing, but it assumes no background in any of these fields.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: ARTH 5830, CIMS 5830, GSWS 5200
1 Course Unit
LALS 6106 Democracy in Comparative Perspective
This graduate seminar focuses on issues of political regime change and democratization, as studied in the comparative politics literature. The course is structured in three parts. In the first part, we scrutinize conceptualizations and measurements of democracy that are used in comparative politics. In the second part, we study political economy and comparative historical theories about the causes of democratization. We assess the relative strength of theories that focus on economic development, inequality (whether of income, land, or labor), social class actors, insurgency, institutions, and/or strategic choices and interactions. In the final part of the course, political regimes in action, we study different aspects of democratization as they relate to current and salient issues of comparative politics.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: PSCI 6106
1 Course Unit
LALS 6550 Black Political Thought: Difference And Community
This course is designed to familiarize graduate students with some of the key texts and debates in Africana Studies concerning the relationship between racial slavery, modernity and politics. Beginning with the Haitian Revolution, much of black political thought (thinking and doing politics) has advocated group solidarity and cohesion in the face of often overwhelming conditions of servitude, enslavement and coercion within the political economy of slavery and the moral economy of white supremacy. Ideas and practices of freedom however, articulated by political actors and intellectuals alike, have been as varied as the routes to freedom itself. Thus, ideas and practices of liberty, citizenship and political community within many African and Afro-descendant communities have revealed multiple, often competing forms of political imagination. The multiple and varied forms of political imagination, represented in the writings of thinkers like Eric Williams, Richard Wright, Carole Boyce Davies and others, complicates any understanding of black political thought as having a single origin, genealogy or objective. Students will engage these and other authors in an effort to track black political thought's consonance and dissonance with Western feminisms, Marxism, nationalism and related phenomena and ideologies of the 20th and now 21st century.
Also Offered As: AFRC 6550, GSWS 6550
1 Course Unit
LALS 6560 Politics and Social Movements in Contemporary Afro-Latin America
Over the past two decades there has been an explosion of research into Afro-Latin American populations in South America and the Caribbean. During this period a generation of scholars who were largely unsatisfied with the research methods and normative agendas of many scholars, activists and politicians of prior eras began to pose distinct research questions and methodological approaches to various subject matter. Afro-Latin identification and identity ( as both separate from and entangled with national identity) is a major theme in the new literature. Race, racism and inequality, Afro-Latin involvement in social movements, political parties and other forms of political articulation have also been prominent themes. In previous eras, scholars largely emphasized various iterations of purportedly racial and ostensibly cultural mixture such as Mestizaje and Democracia Racial to explain why race and racism did not play a prominent role in social and political mobilization. Contemporary sociologists and anthropologists, however, have found ways to identify attitudes, behaviors , demographic and socio-economic indicators that belie imagery and ideologies of social and political equality achieved through miscegenation (cultural and physical) in Latin America.
Fall
Also Offered As: AFRC 6560, PSCI 6120
1 Course Unit
LALS 6610 Language Diversity and Education
Exploration of issues affecting educational policy and classroom practice in multilingual, multicultural settings, with an emphasis on ethnographic research. Selected U.S. and international cases illustrate concerns relating to learners' bilingual/bicultural/biliterate development in formal educational settings. Topics include policy contexts, program structures, teaching and learning in the multilingual classroom, discourses and identities in multilingual education policy and practice, and the role of teachers, researchers, and communities in implementing change in schools.
Fall
Also Offered As: EDUC 5252
1 Course Unit
LALS 6670 Latin American Art
The numerous traditions of Latin American art have been formed from the historical confluence of Indigenous, European, African, and Asian cultural traditions, each one impacting the others. This lecture course serves as an introduction to these hybrid New World art forms and movements by both providing a large chronological sweep (1492-present) and focusing on several specific countries, including Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Peru, and Argentina.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: ARTH 6670
Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 2670
1 Course Unit
LALS 6770 International Migration
A comprehensive review of theories and research on international migration. The course introduces the basic precepts of neoclassical economics, the new economics of labor migration, segmented labor market theory, world systems theory, social capital theory and the theory of cumulative causation. Readings examine patterns and processes of global migration during the classic age from 1800ï¿?1914 as well as during the postwar period from 1945 to the present. The course also covers a history and evaluation of immigration policies around the world, and devotes signification attention to theoretical and empirical perspectives on immigrant adaptation. Within this larger topic, we will also discuss internal migration and urbanization; the relationship between gender and migration; the spatial distribution of immigrants within the United States, immigrant communities, and ethnic enclaves; and the undocumented population in the United States.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SOCI 6770
1 Course Unit
LALS 6830 Collective Violence, Trauma, and Representation
This seminar is organized as a laboratory space for graduate students and faculty working in a number of adjacent fields and problems. Seminar discussions will be led not only by the primary instructors, but also by a number of guests drawn from the Penn faculty. For the first weeks of the course, we will focus on seminal works in the interlinked areas of history and memory studies, cultural representations of collective violence, trauma studies, and other related topics. Beginning with the Xth week of the course, we will turn to case studies in a variety of geographic, cultural and historical contexts. Additionally, some later sessions of the course will be devoted to a presentation and discussion of a work in progress of a Penn graduate student, faculty member or a guest lecturer.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 6830
1 Course Unit
LALS 6900 Studies in 19th- and 20th-Century Spanish American Literature
Topics vary. Please see the Spanish Department's website for the current course description: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/hispanic-portuguese-studies/pc
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SPAN 6900
1 Course Unit
LALS 6920 Colonial Literature of Spanish America
Topics vary. Please see the Spanish Department's website for the current course description: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/hispanic-portuguese-studies/pc
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SPAN 6920
1 Course Unit
LALS 6940 Spanish and Latin American Cinema
Topics vary. Please see the Spanish Department's website for the current course description: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/hispanic-portuguese-studies/pc
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SPAN 6940
1 Course Unit
LALS 6970 Studies in Latin American Culture
Topics vary. Please see the Spanish Department's website for the current course description: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/hispanic-portuguese-studies/pc
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: SPAN 6970
1 Course Unit
LALS 6971 Afro-Latin America
In-depth analysis of the black experience in Latin America and the Spanish, French and English-speaking Caribbean, since slavery to the present. The course opens with a general examination of the existence of Afro-descendants in the Americas, through the study of fundamental historical, political and sociocultural processes. This panoramic view provides the basic tools for the scrutiny of a broad selection of literary, musical, visual, performance, and cinematic works, which leads to the comprehension of the different ethical-aesthetic strategies used to express the Afro-diasporic experience. Essential concepts such as negritude, creolite, and mestizaje, as well as the most relevant theories on identity and identification in Latin America and the Caribbean, will be thoroughly examined, in articulation with the interpretation of artistic works. Power, nationalism, citizenship, violence, religious beliefs, family and community structures, migration, motherhood and fatherhood, national and gender identities, eroticism, and sexuality are some of the main issues discussed un this seminar.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: AFRC 6971, ENGL 7971, SPAN 6971
1 Course Unit
LALS 9215 Genealogies of Race and Language in Educational Research
This course explores the historical and contemporary co-construction of race and language in educational research. As opposed to treating race and language as self-evident and universal concepts, the course adopts a genealogical perspective that examines their historical development within the context of European colonialism and critically analyzes the legacy of these colonial ideologies in contemporary educational research, policy and practice. Students engage with a range of foundational theoretical and methodological texts to develop a robust understanding of the historical and contemporary relationship between race and language. Students also read, analyze and critique educational research that has sought to apply these theoretical and methodological insights. The course will culminate in students undertaking genealogical research projects on questions of race and language connected to their own educational research interests.
Fall
Also Offered As: EDUC 9215
1 Course Unit