FICTION AND CULTURE OF THE AMERICAS

This course is devoted to a study of the concept of Global South, first as a theoretical question belonging to geopolitics and, second, as a project sustained first by colonizers, explorers, and later by creative writers.  To approach the idea of “South,” we’ll focus in particular on the representation of the South in the literatures of the Americas and, by way of contrast, the European South (specifically, the case of Italy). Starting with Darwin’s observations about Patagonia and Mary Shelley’s assessments of Italy, we will read about the ways in which the South enters the cultural imagination to challenge cosmopolitan sensibilities and the role of the state. We will take this through the tropes of “barbarism” that are carried in descriptions of the South along with the potential for resistance that Southern lands encourage (especially through figures of the outlaw and the brigand). We’ll then bring in the racial component that seems to constitute the paradigm of South (seen in Faulkner’s concern for the legacy of slavery; writings by African migrants who have emigrated to Italy; Chicano writers who have activated the reality of the border as a literary trope; the Mapuche indigenous voices in southern Chile and Argentina whose demands for rectifications of land rights and social recognition have become a thorn in the hide of the state).

Our work will require a study of the operations of travel discourse, the aestheticization of nature, the building of cultural difference (based on race, language, and nation), and the literary and cultural representations of utopias and social justice. Based on the theoretical materials supplied in the first part of the course, students will be invited to report on their own versions of “South” and to lead us in discussion of the cultural and literary dynamics that their research on “South” engenders (this can be “South of the Border,” the South Bronx, South Los Angeles, or Southern Spain, for instance).

In addition to the list of required texts, lots of supplementary materials (essays, films, music) to chomp on. Several short response papers, class presentations, and a research paper.

Required texts:

Aira, Cèsar. The Hare, New York: New Directions

La liebre. Buenos Aires: Emecé

Chatwin, Bruce. In Patagonia. New York: Penguin.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom. New York: Vintage.

Gramsci, The Southern Question. New York: Bordighera Press.

Lakhous, Amara. Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio. New York: Europa Editions, 2008.

Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a Piazza Vittorio. Roma: Edizione e/o.

Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe. The Leopard. Il Gattopardo (English and Italian). New York: Pantheon.