171 - 180 of 246 results for: Literary history

From Sally Hemings to Michelle Obama and Beyonce, this course explores the ways that racial identity has been experienced, represented, and contested throughout American history. Engaging historical, legal, and literary texts and films, this course examines major historical transformations that have shaped our understanding of racial identity. This course also draws on other imaginative modes including autobiography, memoir, photography, and music to consider the ways that racial identity has been represented in American culture.

How did images maintain, construct, or transform political power during the conquest and colonization of Mexico? The creation and destruction of visual materials in this period had a complicated relationship with power. The pictographic codices that celebrated the expansive Aztec Empire were created after its fall; and the conquistadors' indigenous allies painted some of the most triumphalist narratives of the conquest. Friars accused indigenous peoples of "idolatry" both to justify the destruction of their images and objects, and to construct legal defenses of their humanity. Colonial authorities frequently claimed Afro-Catholic festivals were seditious. In light of such complexity, official histories that recount the top-down consolidation of royal and viceroyal power are suspiciously simple. What counter-narratives do images and other visual phenomena from this tumultuous period offer? This course introduces students to major texts from Colonial Mexico (royal chronicles, conquistadors' tales, letters, poems, festival accounts) alongside a fascinating trove of images (painted codices with Nahuatl texts, feather mosaics, and indigenous heraldry) and considers how experiences of images and spectacles were transformed into textual accounts ("ekphrasis" or the literary device of description). Taught in Spanish with accommodations for non-ILAC students who are still improving their language skills

Focuses on political regimes, transregional connections, economic interactions and sociocultural formations in the early modern Islamic Afro-Eurasia. Topics include complex political-economic systems of the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires and expansion of Turco-Persianate political and literary cultures across the Post-Mongolian Eurasia; experiences of various Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Hindu, as well as urban, rural and nomadic communities and networks under Islamicate political regimes; consolidation of transregional commerce and cultural exchange with the proliferation of networks of merchants, scholars and sufis; new tendencies in knowledge, individual, gender, family, social order, and religion; incorporation of the Islamic world in the global economy; Muslims in the age of revolutions; political and social reforms and consolidation of Muslim internationalism in the age of imperialism.

In El Centro Chicano y Latino at Stanford, there is a mural by Chicana artist Juana Alicia titled The Spiral Word: Codex Estanfor. The mural draws inspiration from the history and literature of multiethnic Latin America, from ancient texts like the Mayan Popol Vuh to contemporary Chicanx poetry. Through close examination of the mural and the texts it references, this course will delve into the shared cultural history of Latin America, the current diversity within the Latinx community in the United States, and future visions centered on ecological renewal. In this seminar-style course, we will analyze short texts by authors directly featured in the mural, including Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Jose Martí, Gabriela Mistral, and the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico. Additionally, we will explore works by other authors who influenced Juana Alicia, such as Jorge Luis Borges and Junot Diaz. Central moments that have shaped the cultural history of the Americas, such as the Zapatista Movement in Mexico and the struggles of Black freedom fighters, will also be examined. By the course's conclusion, we will have explored foundational texts and events that define Latin America's cultural and literary history. Moreover, we will gain insight into how these foundational authors have been interpreted and reinterpreted within both Latinx and Latin American literary traditions.

Focus is on the evolution of the Spanish language from its earliest Latin roots to its modern forms, placing it in dialogue with other Iberian Romance vernaculars. Students will explore how historical, social, and political forces - from early contact with Arabic to the rise of Castilian as a state language - shaped the development of Spanish over time. Through close analysis of primary texts and engagement with key secondary scholarship, we will investigate sound changes, shifts in grammar and vocabulary, and the emergence of literary registers. No prior background in linguistics is required. Taught in English.

What are the different shapes that Western colonialism took over the centuries? How did people resist the symbolic and material oppressions engendered by such colonialist endeavors? This course offers a deep dive into history of the emergence of Western colonialism (alt: Spanish and Portuguese empires) by focusing on literary and cultural strategies of resisting coloniality in Latin America, from the 16th century to the present. Students will examine critiques of empire through a vast array of sources (novel, letter, short story, sermon, history, essay), spanning from early modern denunciations of the oppression of indigenous and enslaved peoples to modern Latin American answers to the three dominant cultural paradigms in post-independence period: Spain, France, and the United States. Through an examination of different modes of resistance, students will learn to identify the relation between Western colonialism and the discriminatory discourses that divided people based on their class, gender, ethnicity, and race, and whose effects are still impactful for many groups of people nowadays. Authors may include Isabel Guevara, Catalina de Erauso, el Inca Garcilaso, Sor Juana, Simón Bolívar, Flora Tristán, Silvina Ocampo, Jorge Luis Borges, and Gabriel García Márquez. Taught in Spanish.

This course will explore the different kinds of modernisms and modernities that Latin American artists and authors have produced from the early twentieth century to the present. Defined as a break with the past and with tradition, the term "modernism" in Latin America has signified specific transformations that speak to the continent's long history of colonialism and alleged marginality in relation to Europe and the United States. How have Latin American artistic and literary movements drawn from and broken with European modernisms and avant-gardes? What meanings of "tradition" and "modernity" emerge from their works, especially in their engagement with Indigenous and Afro-Latin American cultures? By examining artworks together with literary texts, we will address their aesthetic dimensions, as well as the socio-historical and political conditions that made them possible. Some movements may include Antropofagia (Brazil), Mexican Muralism, Surrealism, Indigenisms, Afro-Caribbean art and literature, Abstractionism, Neo-Concretism, and Tropicalia. Course content and discussions will be in English. ILAC/Spanish majors should take the course for 5 units and must do the readings and assignments in Spanish.

This course takes students on a tour through the culture, literature, and history of Mexico guided by 10 emblematic images. From the mythical foundation of Mexica (Aztec) Tenochtitlan to the Mexican Revolution to the present day, Mexico has sustained strikingly beautiful and complex visual cultures. They include the painted books of the Mexica known as codices; the feather mosaics of Indigenous amanteca; costumbrista paintings of typically Mexican customs; maps that sustained Indigenous struggles for land rights; photos of the brave soldaderas (women soldiers) in the Mexican Revolution; Diego Rivera's sweeping murals and Frida Kahlo's striking self-portraits; and the "moving images" of Mexican Golden Age Cinema. Each week of this course features a lecture and a discussion session on one emblematic image to be studied alongside secondary images and short literary and historical texts. Beginners are welcome in this introductory course. Taught in Spanish.

This course takes students on a trip to major capital cities at different moments in time, including Renaissance Florence, Golden Age Madrid, colonial Mexico City, imperial Beijing, Enlightenment and romantic Paris, existential and revolutionary St. Petersburg, roaring Berlin, modernist Vienna, and transnational Dakar. While exploring each place in a particular historical moment, we will also consider the relations between culture, power, and social life. How does the cultural life of a country intersect with the political activity of a capital? How do large cities shape our everyday experience, our aesthetic preferences, and our sense of history? Why do some cities become cultural capitals? Primary materials for this course will consist of literary, visual, sociological, and historical documents (in translation). No prerequisites.