230636 Contesting Cultural Space in the Americas (S) (WiSe 2010/2011)

- “Introduction to Inter-American Studies: Contesting Cultural Space in the Americas”

The course will take place in room C4-241

Let’s put it this way, the subject matter of this introductory course to Inter-American studies is the bi-continental hemisphere that expands from the Artic to the Antarctic and between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. In other words, this course critically engages with AMERICA which is also the object of study of Americanists in the fields of American, New American, Latin American, Inter-American, Hemispheric studies, but, some would claim, certainly is not the subject matter of Americanists working in the field of American American studies! From a historical perspective, as the reader might be guessing, we will inevitably engage with rhetorical issues, or what Bell Chevigny and Gari Laguardia have called continental “rhetorical malpractice,” and attempt to disentangle/grasp the unique and/or not so unique quality of Americanness of a territory that some have considered a volatile territory of chronic, if not, exceptional instability from the moment the hyperbolic Christopher Columbus set foot on it. Thus we will engage with proverbial questions such as: What is in a name? What is in the name America? Who claims/disclaims nationalist, linguistic, religious, geopolitical, and cultural spaces in America? Who establishes and confers Americanness on the inhabitants of the American continent? What is truly American in the American continent? And most importantly, borrowing the words by the Argentinean essayist Ezekiel Martínez Estrada in another context, we will try to establish if there is an (imagined) American unity in what really is not American?

Bibliography

This course is READING INTENSIVE. Students are strongly encouraged to start studying the literary texts to their earliest convenience.

Required Reading

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/ La frontera

Galeano, Eduardo. Open Veins of Latin America

Kincaid, Jamaica. Small Place

Menchú, Rigoberta and Elizabeth Burgos-Debray. I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala.