Poetics of the Avant-Garde in Latin America

Catalog description

This course traces the shocks and flows of avant-garde activities through Latin America in the early twentieth century and beyond. We will explore manifestoes, poetry, artworks, and film from Argentina, the Caribbean, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru, looking at the ways in which avant-garde writing and art engages the senses to produce local forms for local contexts, but also to communicate beyond them. We will also look at the avant-garde’s afterlives in the 1970s and the early 2000s. Some of the questions we will ask are: what are the distinctive forms and concerns of Latin American modernity, and how do these differ from European aesthetic politics? What kind of regional network gets activated by the historical avant-gardes, and what is that network’s relation to global flows? How and why does the avant-garde reappear in later moments, and to what ends?