Posthuman Latin America: Contemporary Imagination and Visions of the Future

Catalog description

What does it mean to be human? Does the human experience have limits? What happens when we stop being at center stage and something else, animals, plants, technology, the climate, starts occupying our place? Historically, answers to these questions have come from U.S., European and Asian culture, their film industry, literature, speculative artifacts, and academia. In this class, however, we will search to answer these questions from the perspective of Latin American, a standpoint marked by cultural multiplicity, sociopolitical complexity, uneven development, and radical imagination. Starting with Latin American historians who have written on who is and who gets to be human in the region, we will explore various aspects of the Latin American human and posthuman condition through analyzing non-textual media, literature, cultural essays, and the historical framework that produced them. We will concentrate on materials from Argentina, Bolivia,