RLSP 219
Latin American Diasporic Cultures: The Venezuelan Case Fall 2024
Division I

The history of Latin America cannot be fully understood without the study of the mass migrations that have taken place to and from the region throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. These displacements differ in nature, do not share a single origin, route, or destination. They primarily stem from complex political conflicts (racial, gender, sexual, economic, climatic) and have left a definitive mark on the hemispheric cultural imagination. This course aims to study the narratives surrounding migration and migrants in Latin America. What are the geographies of displacement? Is the Chihuahuan Desert or the Darien Gap a wall? Is the Caribbean Sea a border? What happens to the narrative when it emerges under the sign of exile? How does the figure of the migrant destabilize notions of law, nation, and personhood? How is the migrant body constituted, and how do literature, cinema, visual arts, or performance portray it? We will conduct a panoramic analysis of cultural materials and critical interventions produced throughout the continent regarding the figure of the migrant, arriving at the current Venezuelan diaspora–comprising more than seven million people–and its aesthetic, ethical, and political resonances. Primary materials include texts by Reinaldo Arenas, Virgilio Piñera, Manuel Ramos Otero, Valeria Luiselli, Sonia Nazario, Juan Pablo Villalobos, Balam Rodrigo, Adalber Salas Hernández, and Gina Saraceni, as well as works by visual artists José Rafael Perozo and Gerardo Rosales, films by Mariana Rondón and Diego Quemada-Diez, among others. Conducted in Spanish, the course will also have a public orientation, with some activities open to the wider university community.