SPAN550B

Hispanic Languages, Literatures and Cultures

Cultural Cannibalisms: Avant-garde to Decolonial

In this interdisciplinary and comparative course, we will study cultural cannibalisms in Latin American literature and culture within a hemispheric and global context. We will examine critical texts and analyze specific literary and art projects, from avant-garde movements to the 21st century, according to a postcolonial / decolonial theoretical framework and tropes of cultural consumption and exchange (e.g., intertextuality, bricolage, transculturation, hybridity, anthropophagy). Starting from the avant-garde concept of “cultural cannibalism,” which proposed a satirical and metaphorical devouring of foreign elements that, once processed with local elements, produce a synthesis, we will study visual and textual intersections (literary texts, films, images) in a variety of locations. One of the seminar’s objectives is to question how the image and concept of cannibalism became cultural models of critical appropriation within specific social, political, and historical contexts.

Language of instruction: Spanish

Instructor: Dr. Alessandra Santos

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Grading Breakdown

Coming soon!

Readings

Primary Texts (short selections from):

  • Cristóbal Colón “Diario de abordo - primer viaje” (1492-3)
  • Michel de Montaigne “De los caníbales” (1580)
  • Hans Staden A True Story and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-eating People in the New World, America (1557)
  • Jean de Léry History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil (1578)
  • Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg Funk Staden (2007)
  • Francis Picabia “Manifeste Cannibale Dada” (1920)
  • Revista Martín Fierro (1924-1927)
  • Alfredo Mario Ferreiro El hombre que se comió un autobus (1927)
  • Oswald de Andrade “Manifiesto Antropófago” (1928)
  • Paula Heredia and Coco Fusco The Couple in the Cage (1993)
  • Dennis O’Rourke Cannibal Tours (1986)
  • Alberto Fuguet Mala onda (1991)
  • Peter Greenaway The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989)
  • Juan José Saer El entenado (1982)
  • Art by: Tropicália / Brazil, Tania Bruguera, Regina José Galindo, Teresa Margolles
  • Jorge Furtado Isla de las Flores (1989)
  • Lucy Walker Waste Land (2010)
  • Jenniffer Baichwal Manufactured Landscapes (2006)

Secondary texts (selections):

  • Peter Hulme “Columbus and the Cannibals” (1995)
  • Carlos A. Jáuregui Canibalia: canibalismo, calibanismo, antropofagia cultural y consumo (2008)
  • Claude Lévi-Strauss Anthropology and Myth (1984)
  • Kim Beauchesne “La parrilla viajera: canibalismo y colonialidad en la cultura contemporánea de las Américas (Chagoya, Dias, Riedweg y Cros)” (2016)
  • Fernando Ortiz Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (1940)
  • Roberto Fernández Retamar Todo Caliban (2002)
  • Abril Trigo “Shifting Paradigms: From Transculturation to Hibridity” (2000)
  • Haroldo de Campos “De la razón antropofágica: Europa bajo el signo de la devoración” (1980)
  • Crystal Bartolovich “Consumerism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Cannibalism” (1998)
  • Rita De Grandis “The First Colonial Encounter in El entenado by Juan José Saer: Paratextuality and History in Postmodern Fiction.” (1993)
  • Jonatham Lethem “The Ecstasy of Influence” (2007)
  • Eduardo Viveiros de Castro “Metafísicas Caníbales” (2010)
  • Macarena Gómez-Barris “Mapuche Hunger Acts: Epistemology of the Decolonial” (2012)
  • Macarena Gómez-Barris The Extractive Zone Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (2017)