Detention and Freedom in the Americas

Catalog description

On a continent where pretexts for the privation of liberty range from criminal activity to political beliefs to cross-border migration, creative writing - as Chilean-American writer and human rights activist Ariel Dorfman once commented - has a powerful relationship to hope and survival. In this course, we will read poetry, short fiction and testimonial writing from spaces of detention across Latin America and the U.S., asking how subjects in detention represent themselves, their aspirations to freedom, their physical and social environment, and the languages of defense and protection that ostensibly justify their detention. Primary texts by contemporary writers in Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, the U.S. and at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base; readings and class discussion in Spanish.