RMST270

Introduction to Hispanic Cultures

This course offers an engaging survey of cultural texts from Latin America and Spain, drawing on literature, film, visual arts, and music to explore how Hispanic cultures shape history and society. Moving across thematic and social contexts, we will examine the broad cultural and transnational dynamics that connect, divide, and define communities across the Spanish-speaking world.

Students will develop practical techniques for cultural analysis as we move through the following thematic units: language; land and people; migration, exile, and diaspora; resistance and revolution; magical realism; transnational cultural flows; popular culture and mass media; and gender, difference, and social class.

Questions to be examined: How do works of art define and challenge what we mean by Hispanic cultures? How does culture engage with history and urgent social issues? What strategies emerge from within and across vast cultural diversity? What are the major historical transformations that have shaped regional cultures? And how do cultural networks operate and circulate transnationally?

Whether you come with prior knowledge of the region or are encountering these cultures for the first time, this course invites you to look and listen more critically at the world around you.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

1. Identify and apply core methods of cultural analysis to diverse texts (including literature, film, visual art, and music) produced in Latin America and Spain.
2. Situate cultural production within its historical, political, and social contexts, demonstrating an understanding of how culture both reflects and intervenes in public life.
3. Critically examine key themes, including migration, resistance, gender, and transnationalism, across a broad range of Hispanic cultural traditions.
4. Analyze the transnational flows and networks through which cultural forms, ideas, and identities circulate across and beyond the Spanish-speaking world.

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be expected to:

1. Demonstrate critical thinking and analytical writing skills by producing close readings and comparative analyses of cultural texts from Latin America and Spain.
2. Engage respectfully and thoughtfully with cultural difference, reflecting on the diversity of experiences, histories, and perspectives within the Hispanic world.
3. Communicate ideas about culture, history, and identity clearly and effectively in both written and oral formats.

Apply interdisciplinary frameworks drawn from cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and transnational studies to interpret cultural materials.

Language of instruction: English

Instructor: Dr. Alessandra Santos

Prerequisites: None