SPAN 485 Family Portraits (taught in Spanish) 

This course, taught in Spanish, explores a wide range of Latin American and Latinx cultural production – mostly novels, but also poetry, short stories, historical narratives, paintings, films — that use the family as a point of departure to represent and interrogate questions of cultural identity and transculturation, colonial encounters, abolitionism, nation-building, authority, political repression and historical agency. Readings will be drawn from the colonial period (Bernal Díaz del Castillo, eighteenth-century casta paintings) and the nineteenth century (Gomez de Avellaneda’s Sab, Matto de Turner’s Aves sin nido, Aluísio Azevedo’s Mulatto); they will also include more recent texts (Castellanos’ Oficio de tinieblas, Aguirre’s Gonzalo Guerrero, Ferré’s Maldito Amor, and Castillo’s So Far from God).