FICTION AND CULTURE OF THE AMERICAS

The representation of the indigenous peoples of the Americas is one of the central issues of the literature of the hemisphere. From the need to justify and rationalize the genocide and displacement of native peoples, to the persistence of an ambivalent fascination with Indians, to the aesthetic experimentation with native epistemologies, and, finally, to the contemporary reassessment of Native social and literary history, the broad geographic and historical distribution of the contested representations of indigeneity is crucial for understanding the literature of the Americas. The novel, the great narrative form of capitalist modernity, has been equally at home in capital’s peripheries. Urban spaces and rural “backwardness,” free market relations and coerced labor, social progress and in Roberto Schwarz’ words “the regressive potentialities of modernization,” the plasticity of American—used here in the hemispheric sense—novel has been capable of representing such extremes. In this course we will read South, Central, and North American novelists in order to examine the relationship between the representation of indigeneity and the development of the novel in the Americas.

Possible readings include: James Fenimore Cooper Last of the Mohicans, José María Arguedas Deep Rivers, Rosario Castellanos The Nine Guardians, Victor Montejo Mr. Putison’s Adventures Among the Maya, D’Arcy McNickle The Surrounded, and Louise Erdrich Tracks.