COML 6706

Between Asia and Latin America: Transpacific Trends in 20th Century Literature, Art, and Theory

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2014-2015.

Asia and Latin America no longer occupy the disconnected extremes of an imagined map. Nor do they embody the antipodes of East and West, framing Europe and North America as the symbolic centers. Rather, accelerated by recent geopolitical and global economic shifts, new connections between Asia and Latin America revive the "swarmlike buzz of activity" around and across the perimeter of the Pacific that Claude Lévi-Strauss had pitted against "the great Atlantic silence" prior to the European "discovery" of the Americas. This course explores different perspectives on the intercultural study of Asia and Latin America with the aim of rethinking the Transpacific as a method and a lens for comparison that challenges conventional geopolitical models, rather than simply an area or a region. To do so, we will explore multiple meanings, methodologies, and mappings of the Transpacific through a wide range of real and imagined links between Asian and Latin American literature, art, and theory: from diaspora, textual circulation, and cultural exchanges to uneven dialogues, compelling analogies, and conceptual affinities.

When Offered Spring.

Comments Co-meets with COML 4706/PORT 4540.

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