BA Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies

Revolutionary Cultures of Latin America will look at how Latin Americans have used different forms of cultural expression to depict, critique and foment political revolution. Students on this unit will compare the origins, practices and outcomes of several revolutions that took place in Latin America during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including popular uprisings from below and state-led repression from above. They will then explore the varying ways in which those political transformations have been represented in Latin American culture, whether in literature, film, photography or other written and visual forms. Finally, they will consider how such political revolutions have, in turn, provoked revolutions in that very same cultural sphere.

• To familiarise students with political revolutions in Latin America from the start of the twentieth century to the present
• To introduce students to a range of written and visual texts that depict those revolutions
• To help students think about the relationship between revolution and culture so that they can develop a framework for thinking about that relationship in other contexts
• To improve students’ intercultural awareness
• To improve students’ knowledge of Spanish

By the end of this course students will be familiar with:

• some of the major revolutions in Latin America since the start of the twentieth century and their principal political causes and outcomes
• selected cultural responses to those revolutions
• how politics and cultural production can interact and inform each other and how they might apply this theoretical framework to other cultural products
• basic theories of revolution and the differences between them

By the end of this course students will be able to:

• apply theories of revolution to specific historical contexts in Latin America
• analyse the way that written or visual texts represent and respond to political revolution
• evaluate and compare different strategies used by cultural producers to create meaning
• synthesise diverse arguments about cultural texts and offer their own interpretation of those texts in both written and spoken form

By the end of this course students will be able to demonstrate:

• an ability to carry out close-textual analysis
• an ability to work effectively in groups
• improved written and spoken skills

By the end of this course students will have improved the following transferable skills:

• written and oral communication
• intercultural awareness and understanding
• working in teams and participating in group discussion
• independent thinking, research and planning
• working with primary and secondary sources, both in English and Spanish

• Castro, Daniel. (1999) Revolution and Revolutionaries: Guerrilla Movements in Latin America
• Chasteen, John Charles. (2006) Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America.
• Craven, David. (2002) Art and Revolution in Latin America, 1910-1990
• Franco, Jean. (2002) The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War
• Gonzalez, Mike and David Treece (1992) The Gathering of Voices: The Twentieth-Century Poetry of Latin America
• Kumaraswami, Par and Niamh Thornton. (2007) Revolucionarias: Conflict and Gender in Latin American Narratives by Women
• Swanson, Philip, ed. (2003) The Companion to Latin American Studies
• Wright, Thomas C. (2001) Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution