SPAN 322 | Visual Culture and Modernity in Latin America

How do new ways of seeing and being seen shape the divergent experiences of modernity in Latin America? This is the basic question that SPAN 322 asks by examining a series of case studies that roughly span the last two hundred years of its history. "Modernity" is an object of much debate, but might be provisionally defined as the competing accounts of the major sociopolitical, economic, and cultural processes shaping our world. Traditionally, the foundational literary works of the so-called "lettered city" have been the sources privileged by scholars to understand Latin American modernities. Drawing on recent scholarship, this course adopts the interdisciplinary approach known as "visual culture" in order to understand how emergent technologies and their attendant practices have been instrumental in constructing and critiquing particular configurations of power. These may include photography, pavilions at international expositions, museums, performance art, and multimedia spectacles.