Spring 2023 NYU Consortium Classes

LATC-GA 20 - Intermediate Quechua II
Date/time: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 2:00m - 3:15pm 
Instructor: Odi Gonzalez
Location: 194 Mercer Room 303

Quechua is the most important and most widely distributed indigenous language in South America, with about 10 million speakers living from the high mountains to the tropical lowlands in Colombia (where the language is called Ingano), Ecuador (where it is called kichwa or runa shimi, "human speech"), Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina (where it is usually spelled Quechua and called, by its speakers, runa simi). Studying Quechua opens a window onto alternative ways of thinking about social worlds, about space and time, family, and humans' relationship with the natural world. Quechua is recommended for students anticipating travel to the Andean region, those interested in language and linguistics, and those interested in indigenous literatures and cultures. Students who satisfactorily complete introductory Quechua will be well-prepared for intensive summer study at one of many summer study abroad programs in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia that will put them in closer contact with the indigenous world.

LATC-GA 2030 Feminist Constellations: Extractivism, Affective Labor and Politics of Care
Instructor: Ana Alvarez, Pamela Calla
Date/Time: Thursday, 2:00pm – 4:30 pm
Location: KJCC 404

In a context of late racial-patriarchal capitalism, new forms of accumulation have emerged that deepen inequalities. Securitization and financialization are added to this tendency, eroding public care infrastructure and destabilizing ecosystems and communities, particularly poor urban and rural, indigenous, queer of color, workers. Another central aspect of this process is the expansion of the extractive frontiers and the attempts of destruction of indigenous modes of human and non-human community making. In the Americas, Afro-Diasporic and Indigenous social movements are weaving together diverse feminisms with anti-racisms and anti-extractivisms to forge new and emergent modes of struggle. In this seminar, we will link these struggles with the discussion of notions such as affective economies, communities of care, ecological disasters and the entanglement between them. We will also explore that despite these multiple crises, livable spaces are still being created.

LATC-GA 1014 Queer Corporalities in Latin America: Eroticism, Aesthetics and Politics
Instructor: Ana Alvarez
Date/Time: Tuesday, 9:30am – 12:00pm
Location: KJCC 404

In this course, we will analyze the transformations across the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, of embodied forms of queer identities, particularly travesti and Trans*, in the Americas, as a way of problematizing wider constellations of eroticism, aesthetics expression and political formations of activisms. We will put in dialogue seminal voices in queer theory such as Eve Kosofsky Sedwick, Lauren Berlant, Susan Stryker, and José Muñóz, but also psychoanalytical and feminists discussions including Laplanche and Pontalis, Gilles Deleuze, Jacqueline Rose, Jill Casid and Ariella Azoulay. In our readings, we will attempt to move beyond exhausted ideas of identity and to expand our discussion towards the complexities involved in constructing subjectivities, not least in relation with the entangled agencies of the more-than-human. How can erotic experience create a dialogue with a gendered and sexual subjectivity? What is the place of identity politics and/or of the entangled agencies of the more-than-human in this context? What are the tensions but also the possible gains for a radical politics? How can aesthetic experiences as a site of critical imagination work with and interrogate those potentialities? Materials studied will include literary writing (Manuel Puig, Néstor Perlongher, Pedro Lemebel, Dionne Brand), the visual arts (La chola Poblete, Tadaskia, Winnie Minerva, Felipe Rivas San Martín, Archivo de la Memoria Trans), and film (Karim Ainouz, Susana Aitkin and Carlos Aparicio)

LATC-GA 1017 Government and Politics of Latin America
Instructor: Patricio Navia
Date/Time: Tuesday, 4:55pm – 7:25pm
Location: KJCC 404

This class explores the government and politics of Latin America from the 1990s to the present, with a focus on the degree to which countries in the region have succeeded in consolidating democracy since the end of the Cold War. In the 1990s, countries embraced—with different levels of enthusiasm—the Washington Consensus neo-liberal economic reforms, and electoral Democracy became the norm in the region. Many believed Latin America had finally left behind a past of political instability, military coups, populism, revolutionary movements and radical political change. However, consolidating democracy proved to be much more difficult than attaining electoral democracy. In the course we will see that, for the most part, Latin American countries have failed to develop strong institutions and a strong civil society, two characteristics that are often associated with consolidated democracies. The period from 2003 to 2012 (financial crisis notwithstanding) brought unprecedented levels of economic growth in Latin America. The terms of trade were overwhelmingly positive for developing nations. Yet, growth did not result in substantial reductions in poverty and inequality. Why is inequality so persistent in the region? If the good years did not help consolidate democracy, can we expect democracy to fare well in bad years? Although there were problems of democratic consolidation in Peru, Ecuador, and Argentina in the mid 1990s, the election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 1998 seemed to signal broader obstacles and problems for insufficiently consolidated democracies in Latin America. After Chávez, different challenges to democratic consolidation have appeared in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, Nicaragua, Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico. Are there similarities among them? Are they radically different? Are there regional patterns that we can identify? Through discussion of Latin American history and democratic theory, we will explore different challenges to democratic consolidation in Latin America.

LATC-GA 1020 Comparative Colonialisms: Latin American and the United States (same as AMST-GA 3701-001)
Instructor: Maria Saldana
Date/Time: Monday, 2:00pm – 4:45pm
Location: 20 Cooper Square, Room 485

Comparative study of Spanish and British colonialism; examines forms of governmentality implanted by both in Latin America, U.S. & Canada, and legacies thereof. Examines how colonialism produced distinct racial formations in Hispanophone and Anglophone America, focused primarily on production of Indigenous Afromestizo identities. Colonial models race were accomplished through disciplining of gender and sexuality, thus course engages active entwining of race and sex. Purpose of comparison is to assist in addressing the different modes of political subjectivity that emerged as a consequence of distinct legacies of racial formation. We critically evaluate limits of comparativist methodology, and look for modes that move us beyond comparison. How is it that Indigenous identity came to organized itself around the principle of autonomy in Latin American and around the principle of sovereignty in the United States? How did different models of enslavement in the Americans produce different modes of Black and Afromestizo enfranchisement in their aftermath? How is whiteness lived in Latin American and the U.S.? What are the geographical limits of the "white settler colonialism" model in the Americas? In short, how does racial citizenship differ in the U.S. and Latin America? We examine colonial documents coupled with contemporary analysis of colonialism. Twin goals: to gain a better understanding of the contemporal, yet distinct racial geographies in the Americas, and, as scholars of race formation, to avoid universalizing one particular experience to all of the Americas.