SPAN 597 Commodity Cultures

This seminar examines the literary and cultural representations and repercussions of Latin America’s extractive economies. Letters, diaries, travelogues, and narratives from the colonial period through the nineteenth century crafted Latin America as a "marvelous possession" whose natural resources were to be controlled, extracted, and exploited for the benefits of elites. To explore how colonial, neocolonial, and neoliberal dynamics of extractive capitalism resonate within Latin American culture, this seminar will focus on commodities such as cotton, sugar, gold, coffee, water, and oil. At the end of the semester, we will move beyond these goods to consider culture itself as a commodity. Our discussions will draw on theoretical and critical readings from, among others, Héctor Hoyos, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Ericka Beckman, Charlotte Rogers, and George Yúdice, in dialogue with primary texts, including essays, novels, and films by Júlia Lopes de Almeida, Fernando Ortiz, Graciliano Ramos, Cristina Rivera Garza, Sebastião Salgado, and Lucrecia Martel.