Course

The following course is offered regularly at St. Lawrence. Additional courses in Central America are available as part of the St. Lawrence program in Costa Rica and in the ISEP programs.

CLAS 104. Survey to Caribbean and Latin American Studies.

This interdisciplinary core course is designed to introduce students to the richness and diversity of Latin American cultures, the region's turbulent history of conquest and colonization and the problems of its development. The course familiarizes students with the vitality of Latin American art and literature. Our final objective is to relate Latin American culture with "cultura latina"' in the United States. The course provides a framework for more advanced studies on Caribbean and Latin American themes.

Departamental Offerings (CLICK CLASS NAME FOR SYLLABUS)

English
ENG 224: Caribbean Literature in English
This course looks at Caribbean literature and culture from a variety of national perspectives. Although we focus primarily on the Anglophone Caribbean, former colonies of Britain, we read works translated from French, Dutch and Spanish. We attempt to deconstruct the notion of the Caribbean a "playground" for tourists and look closely at the various ethnic groups who live in the region.

Global Studies
GS 250A: La Frontera: Cultural Identities and the Mexico/U.S. border Global Studies Department
This course investigates the cultural expressions derived from the interaction among people from both sides of the Mexico/U.S. border. The goal of the course is to understand the different ways in which immigration, drug smuggling, and transnational industries on affect the everyday life of borderlanders. This course will have an historical and critical approach to studying cultural expressions created around the world’s most transited border. This course explores and examines the production of U. S. Latina/Latino identities as instances of international, cultural, historical, and social borders crossings. In both regional and global contexts, we will analyze the ways in which Mexican American, identities have been shaped by colonial relations vis-à-vis Spain and by postcolonial conditions vis-à-vis the United States.

History
CLAS 104/HIST 115: Survey of Caribbean and Latin American Studies
This is an interdisciplinary core course designed to introduce students to the richness and diversity of Caribbean and Latin American cultures, the regions’ turbulent history of conquest and colonization and the problems of their development. One of our main goals will be to examine our individual places in the histories of the Americas in comparative perspective. We will use many different kinds of materials this semester – primary and secondary texts, fiction and poetry, art, music and film to familiarize ourselves with the vitality of Caribbean and Latin American artistic expression, history, life, and culture. Our final objective is to relate Latin American and Caribbean cultures with the cultures of migrants from these areas in the United States. The course provides a framework for more advanced studies on Caribbean and Latin American themes.

HIST 233: Colonial Latin America
This course is designed as a survey of the formation and historical development of colonial Latin America. We will begin with the initial encounters between some of 8the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the Iberians in the fifteenth century and end with Spain’s final loss of its colonial holdings in the Americas in 1898. Part of our task will be to understand the dynamics of race, class and gender in the colonial societies that developed from the violent collision of cultures during the conquest. The last part of the course will focus on the forces that finally destroyed the American colonial bonds with Spain and Portugal and the colonial legacies that endured after independence.

CLAS 234A/HIST 234A: Modern Latin American & The Caribbean
This course is designed as a survey of modern Latin America and the Caribbean. We will begin with a brief overview of the colonial era and the early national period, but the main focus of the course will be from about 1870 to the present. We will examine the historical roots of the tremendous human and cultural diversity of Latin America and the Caribbean and how this diversity has affected the evolution of societies in the region. Some of the issues that will concern us include: the region's relationships to a changing world economy, politics and human rights, and migration and diasporic cultures. Most of our attention will be focused on Ibero-America, but we will touch on Anglo- and Francophone areas in the Caribbean as well.

HIST 256: Slavery and Freedom in the Americas
This course surveys the topic of the genesis, development, and dissolution of the transatlantic slave trade and the slave societies that created the demand for this trade in both North and South America and the Caribbean. The perspective is Atlantic in scope trying to understand the impact of this forced migration on Africa and Africans and on American (defined as all of the Americas, not just the US) societies. We will discuss the interactions of Africans and their descendents with the indigenous peoples of the Americas and with Europeans. We will tap into some of the wide array of materials now available to study the slave system and the cultures of slave societies in the Americas – memoirs and other primary materials, web-based materials, film, and secondary sources. We will briefly survey some of the movements to abolish the slave trade and slavery itself, examining how the people involved defined freedom. We will end by discussing some of the contemporary debates about the legacies of slavery in the Americas.

HIST 347: Seminar: Caribbean and Latin American History

Sociology
SOC 247a: SPTP: Dilemmas of Development
If the United States is one of the most developed countries in the world, why are there more healthy people per capita in Cuba than in Washington, DC? If we consider India a developing country, why is the literacy rate in Kerala higher than in the United Kingdom? Since President Truman's call for a program of international development to bring countries of the South up to par with countries of the North more than 50 years ago, humanity has been split into "developed" and "underdeveloped" regions. In this class, we will problematize this divide and its continuing consequences for the world. Using case studies from Latin America and other parts of the global South, we will consider the social impacts of development on people around the world, locating this dynamic within the larger contemporary and historical processes of globalization. We will further consider how lifestyles in the North drive changes in the South, and the evolving social resistances to globalization and development. As a seminar, this class will be reading and writing intensive.

SOC 253: Race, Class, and Environmental Justice
This course focuses on the distributional dimensions of environmental degradation and environmental protection, both domestically and globally. Substantive areas of focus will include the siting of hazardous facilities in urban and rural minority communities, the socioecological conditions of migrant farm workers, the extraction of resources from Native lands, the employment structure of hazardous industrial workplaces, population control initiatives directed at peoples-of-color, the siting of thermonuclear weapons testing, and the national and transnational export of toxic waste to the "South"s. The course will also examine the origins and impacts of a distinct environmental justice movement that has emerged within minority and working-class communities, and its relationships to civil rights, labor, and mainstream environmental movements.

SOC 271: Revolution
This course explores the causes and consequences of radical social change through examination of revolution and rebellion in a variety of social contexts. The focus is on the impact of demographic, ecological, economic, and technological changes on the political stability of nation-states. The course investigates the nature of the state and revolutionary contenders, focusing on their relative ability to gain or maintain power through the strategic manipulation of key resources, and explores the opportunities for, and constraints upon, social change in post-revolution societies. Special attention is paid to the tactics and strategies of revolt, including the use of civil disobedience, political violence, revolutionary rhetoric, and strategic coalition formation. Examples will be drawn from revolutions in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America.

SOC 476: Globalization & Sustainability
Globalization and sustainability are two of the most contested terms in current debates on the future of development. In this course we will seek to define these terms and explore the impacts of economic transnationalization on the potential for achieving socially and ecologically sustainable development trajectories. In a seminar discussion format, we will examine the linkages between transnational economic processes and local development, national environmental protection initiatives, and international and intra-national inequality. These discussions will be grounded in case studies of socioeconomic and environmental change in Ecuador, Tanzania and the United States. Course assignments will ask students to assess the ramifications of an increasingly transnational economy on the capacity of specific communities to achieve "sustainability". The course will conclude with an examination of the growing transnational anti-corporate globalization movement.

Spanish
SPAN 102: Elementary Spanish
The principal goal is the acquisition of a basic level of communicative ability in Spanish. Video, film, audio tapes and the Internet provide current materials from Hispanic America, Spain and the United States Latino community to enhance language learning and knowledge of the culture. Language laboratory activities advance conversational skills and oral comprehension.

SPAN 104a: Intermediate Spanish
Spoken and written Spanish are reinforced by a review of grammar and idiomatic strategies for self-expression. The course includes use of videos, music, literature, news
broadcasts and the Internet as means for understanding the contemporary culture of Hispanic America and Spain. Materials in the language laboratory facilitate conversation and increased oral comprehension. Prerequisite: Spanish 101, 102 or equivalent

SPAN 202: Advanced Spanish
Review and expansion of the four skills with emphasis on the oral and written expression of ideas in Spanish on topics of current interest and cultural significance in the Spanish-speaking world. Materials studied include journalist texts, videos, audiotapes, songs and literary works. For students who have completed Spanish 103, 104 or who have four years or more of Spanish at the secondary level.

SPAN 344: Introducción a la literatura latinoamericana
Lectura y análisis de textos literarios representativos de la literatura hispanoamericana. Se dará hincapié al contenido cultural, a las técnicas y estrategias textuales más destacadas de las obras comentadas.

SPAN 344a: Survey of Latin American Literature
Indigenous oral traditions and texts from the period prior to the arrival of the Europeans are examined as well as works from the colonial period to the present. Authors studied from the colonial period include Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Bartolomé de las Casas and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Contemporary authors studied include Borges, García Márquez, Allende and Rigoberta Menchú.

SPAN 347: La poesía de Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) es uno de los poetas más importantes del siglo XX no sólo de los países de lengua española sino del mundo entero. Ganador del Premio Nobel de la Literatura en 1971, este poeta chileno, que parecía escribir en contra de sí mismo en términos estilísticos a lo largo de su vida, tiene una obra muy diversa que ha sido traducido a decenas de idiomas. Para esta introducción a la poesía de Pablo Neruda, utilizaremos el acercamiento crítico de René de Costa que establece distintas etapas de la obra nerudiana que incluyen la poesía amorosa, los experimentos vanguardistas, el hermeticismo, la poesía épica, el lirismo sin adornos, y la anti-poesía conversacional. Los materiales autobiográficos y biográficos nos darán una perspectiva íntima de la relación entre la vida y la obra del autor que experimentó muy de cerca algunos de los conflictos más importantes del siglo xx como, por ejemplo, la guerra civil española, la segunda guerra mundial, la guerra fría y el golpe militar en Chile en 1973. Además de considerar estos acontecimientos internacionales históricos, tomaremos en cuenta la ecología del continente americano como algo fundamental para entender de una manera cabal la poesía de Neruda.

SPAN 347A: Latinoamérica en el cine
En esta clase examinaremos cómo se representa Latinoamérica en películas de directores latinoamericanos, europeos y estadounidenses. Las películas formarán la base de conversaciones, debates e investigación escrita sobre la historia contemporánea, los conflictos étnicos, los papeles tradicionales de hombres y mujeres, y la inmigración y la vida de los hispanos en los Estados Unidos. Tanto el marco teórico de Shohat y Stam y las películas mismas con sus subtítulos en inglés, nos servirán para conversar y escribir en español sobre estos temas.

SPAN 348: Literatura y cultura afro-hispana
A través de este curso se procura exponer al estudiante a las preocupaciones y temas recurrentes de la literatura afro-hispana. La perspectiva básica es examinar una serie de obras literarias y, también, de artefactos culturales bajo la premisa de que son enunciaciones. El entenderlos como tal implica que son respuestas, reacciones y/o reflexiones de un sujeto a problemáticas sobre raza, identidad, cultura, clase social, etc. Esto significa que nos acercaremos a cada enunciado como a un evento en el que alguien dialoga con las reacciones o respuestas que “otros” (blancos, negros, mulatos) han tenido sobre estas mismas problemáticas, y a partir de la especificidad del contexto histórico, político-social o de historia literaria en que se han producido.

Special Topics courses

247 & 248: Special topics courses offer students the opportunity to study specific topics in CLAS when offered by departments.

Additional information and a complete list of the approved courses for the minor can be obtained through the coordinator for Caribbean and Latin American studies or the Center for International and Intercultural Ttudies, located in Carnegie Hall, 108..

 
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