Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Part II Paper SP13
Contemporary Latin American Culture
The late 1960s/early 1970s mark a discernible change in Latin American culture, which is forced to respond to the rise of authoritarian and repressive regimes in many countries of the region, accompanied by the loss of dreams of equitable social transformation, mass exile both for political and economic reasons, the rise of a huge foreign debt, and the often violent imposition of free-market ideologies. In literature, the responses to social repression prompt an abandonment of what have been termed the 'Ulyssean' narratives of the 'Boom', with their sweeping mythical, social and historical visions, in favour of a 'Post-Boom' narrative focused on the response of individuals or marginalized groups to oppression, impoverishment, exile, etc. The more contemporary period, in the aftermath of the dictatorships and the collapse of Cold War politics, provides yet another set of challenges to cultural forms, which attempt to engage with the lost memory of the victims of repression, a huge increase in social inequality, and the rise of transnational social, economic and cultural forces in an era of globalization. This period is characterized by a growing challenge to the nation as a framework posed simultaneously by regions, local social movements, ethnic and popular cultures on the one hand, and by postnational forces, supra-national organizations, global mega-cities, exile, and huge diasporic populations on the other.
This paper leads on well from the Part IB Topics in Latin-American Culture and History (Paper SP5), and makes an interesting sister paper for those who may wish to study Part II Latin American Culture (Paper SP12), although SP13 can certainly be taken independently from either of those papers. The course will give you an insight into the way in which contemporary culture in the region is responding to unprecedented challenges, with topics on dictatorship, urban culture (including cinema), the historical novel, women's writing, popular culture, testimonial literature, queer textualities, post-modern ecologies, and the detective novel, amongst others.
The Paper is divided into two sections: Topics in contemporary Latin American Culture; and Writers, film directors, and artists. The topics are an opportunity to study certain themes across a range of cultural forms which are studied comparatively. The section on individual writers and other cultural producers allows you to look in depth at influential figures such as Argentine writer Manuel Puig (whose novel El beso de la mujer araña became a successful English-language film, Kiss of the Spider Woman), the complex Chilean avant-garde writer who charts the lives of the disposessed in Chile in hallucinatory prose, Diamela Eltit, or the contemporary Colombian artist who had a major exhibition in the Tate recently, Doris Salcedo, amongst many others.
Brazilian culture is not formally taught because there are two other Part II papers which cover it in detail (Paper PG4 and Paper PG5). However, students are welcome to explore Brazilian culture in a comparative manner in answers to the 'topic' questions, where there are many areas of fruitful comparison (so long as you do not draw on substantially the same material for Papers SP13 and PG4 or PG5).
Introductory reading
- Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City (CUP)
- Gerald Martin, Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin-American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (Verso)
- Julio Ortega, Arte de innovar (México: Ediciones del Equilibrista, 1994)
- Idelber Avelar, The Untimely Present: Post-dictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning (1999)
- Carlos Monsiváis, Aires de familia: cultura y sociedad en América Latina (2000)
- Francine Masiello, The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis (2001).
- Donald Shaw, The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction (1998)
A full Reading List for this paper is available online, and the paper has a Learning Support Website.
You can purchase some of the set texts from the local bookshops (Heffers and Waterstone's, who are aware of our reading lists), by post from Grant & Cutler in London, or see the advice on purchasing Latin American texts online. You may be able to purchase second-hand copies of some of the books from Heffers (tel. 01223 568568). You might also like to try online book-sellers like Amazon, alibris or abebooks.
