The Department of Spanish and Portuguese will be offering one course in Winter 2012, described below.

 

The course is taught in English and carries no prerequisites. The course will count toward the major and minor in Spanish if students complete writing and key readings in Spanish.

 

 

New borderlands in Latin America + Spain {preliminary syllabus: click here}

Performance + art + emergency

Winter Session 2012, 1/3–1/21

SPAN UA 551

Monday • Tuesday • Wednesday • Thursday 10:30AM–2:00PM

Professor Jill Lane, jill.lane@nyu.edu

 

This course focuses on cultural production in relation to contemporary sites of intense border politics, with emphasis on the borders between the US and Mexico, Mexico and Central America, and Spain and North Africa. Border-crossing has become a hallmark of the neoliberal era: yet where “globalization” has been characterized by the ever-more rapid flow of goods, information, and capital across increasingly fluid borders of nations, language, and technology, real bodies cross those borders at very different and far less “optimal” speeds. This course engages cultural theory, visual art, film, performance, and activist interventions that illuminate the human impact and costs that characterize contemporary migrations, crossings, and border control. We explore borders as critical thresholds that negotiate relationships between the global north and south, between formal and informal economies, between citizens and “aliens,” between social control and transgression, and that reshape our geographic imaginary of Latin America and Spain. The course is taught in English. The course will count toward the major and minor in Spanish if students complete writing and key readings in Spanish.