Graduate Courses

Examining marginal writing in manuscripts and printed books from the Middle Ages and the early modern period, we interrogate the productive relations between law and culture. We focus on a wide array of sources from the Iberian Peninsula and the Mediterranean. Likewise, we consider different legal systems.

This seminar introduces students to two centuries of Latin American political thought in the form of social and literary essays produced since the times of independence. It aims at studying how Latin American writers have thought of their identity and how they have theorized the political/ cultural heritage of the colony. The seminar starts with the Haitian constitution and contemporary Haitian authors that assess the legacy of the Haitian revolution. It ends with writings on current indigenous movements across the region. Its first unit engages nineteenth century debates over “American identity” that were foundational to the newly constituted nation-states (authors include Bolívar, Lastarria, Alamán, Martí, Sarmiento, Echeverría, Montalvo). Its second unit explores twentieth century debates over cultural independence, the movement of “indigenismo”;  mestizaje, transculturation and heterogeneity, the Caribbean movement of “negritude,” the  metaphor of “cannibalism” to account for the cultural politics of the region, concepts such as “internal colonialism” and “motley society,” and the polemics over the region’s capitalist modernity and post-modernity (authors include Rodó, Da Cunha, Ortiz, Moreno Frajinals, Lezama Lima, Vasconcelos, Reyes, De Andrade,  González Prada, Mariátegui, Antenor Orrego, Zapata, J.L. Borges, J.M. Arguedas, Sergio Buarque de Holanda, Caio Pardo Junior, Jean Price Mars, Jacques Roumain, Aimé Césaire, George Lamming, C.L.R. James, Fanon, Léon Damas, Paulo Freire, Angel Rama, Retamar, Edmundo O’ Gorman, Antonio Candido, Darcy Ribeiro). Its third unit explores recent debates over indigenous cosmologies, coloniality and other ways of knowing (authors include Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, León Portilla, R. Kusch, René Zavaleta Mercado, A. Quijano, Bolivar Echeverría, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Viveiros de Castro). There will be an extra session on the tradition of Latin American feminist thought, depending on the interests of the group.

The seminar’s weekly sessions will be conducted in Spanish. Most of the readings will be Spanish, French, and Portuguese materials (with a few Anglo-Caribbean sources). Students will be provided with English translations, if they prefer them, and will be allowed to write their papers in English. 

This course focuses on the use of images of and in the “New World” during the first century of European exploration, conquest, and colonization in the Americas. We explore printed illustrations that shaped European perceptions of New World “exoticism” and “barbarism,” as well as indigenous pictorial manuscripts that continued and adapted native visual practices and offered alternative views of the conquest. Besides reading texts by European and indigenous authors in which images played an important role (Columbus, Las Casas, Oviedo, Staden, Léry, Raleigh, Sahagún, Guaman Poma), we study nonalphabetic visual sources such as Nahua codices and maps, and portraits and festive performances of Afro-descendants. We also examine how images of the Americas were disseminated in Europe through copied illustrations, generating clichés and stereotypes—terms originally associated with printing techniques—that contributed to the racism and colonialism that have shaped the modern world. We conclude with a discussion of examples of contemporary films that reimagine the colonial Americas.

Lisa Voigt lisa.voigt@yale.edu

This seminar brings together literary and theoretical works that chart planetary relations and connections beyond the paradigm of francophonie. Comparative focus on the poetics and politics of spaces shaped by intersecting routes of colonization and forced migrations: islands (Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Martinique), oceans (Indian, Mediterranean, Atlantic), and deserts (Sahara, Sonoran). Prerequisite: reading knowledge of French; knowledge of Arabic and Spanish invited. Conducted in English.