PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
This course explores the cultural productions surrounding narcos and cocaine in Colombia and Mexico, two countries whose imaginaries have become globally associated with drug trafficking. Beginning with the transformation of the coca leave into an illegal global commodity, passing through the emergence of the figure of the “sicario” in the 1980s, all the way to Netflix’s Narcos’ vision of the War on Drugs and cryptococaine, the course will engage critically with so-called narco-aesthetics in chronicles, movies, television series, short stories, podcasts, and art.
SPRING 2022, SPRING 2023. IMAGINARIES OF EXTRACTION IN LATIN AMERICA
Global capitalism has often imagined Latin America as a collection of “raw” commodities ready to be extracted. In this class, we explore this way of conceiving the region through its cultural production. Throughout the semester, we will engage with various “exemplary” commodities, including bananas, rubber, and sugar. In Capital, Marx famously makes commodities speak. We will unfold the implications of this rhetorical artifice by looking at how commodities have been represented in literature, art, movies, and economic texts, but also at how commodities themselves – as material objects with a history – have shaped aesthetical forms. This approach to Latin American cultural production will serve as an entry point for understanding inequality, neocolonialism, patriarchy, climate change, racism, and their relations to extractivism.
FALL 2021. MONEY AND MATTER IN LATIN AMERICA
What is money? How has money shaped the material world that surrounds us? How have objects in turn influenced our financial thinking? In this course, students will learn to use humanistic tools to reflect on these questions by examining the cultural production of Spanish America. Engaging with works that span from the Baroque period to the present-day neoliberal era, this class invites us to think creatively about the complex relationship between money and materiality that is at the core of capitalist development. We will analyze the verbal and visual strategies used in the aesthetic traditions of Spanish America to illuminate contemporary processes of wealth accumulation and dispossession. A particular emphasis will be placed on the role of money in the reproduction –or challenging– of gender, race, and class inequalities, as well as facilitating extractive enterprises of profound ecological impact.
BROWN UNIVERSITY
SPRING 2021. BOOMTOWNS: FINANCE AND LITERATURE
This class explores the relationship between finance and literature in Latin America from the 1880s to the present. We will study money and the manifold social relationships that it facilitates through the works of authors such as Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Clorinda Matto de Turner (Peru), Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), and Rosario Castellanos (Mexico). We will examine, among other things, the literary creation of three fictional “boomtowns”: Kíllac, Macondo, and Tora. Through the invention of these places –and their relation to the commodities that made them possible (precious minerals, bananas, and oil)– literature in Latin America has sought to give sense to its ‘peripheral’ position within the capitalist world system and challenged common-sense narratives about economic development, progress, and social structures.
FALL 2020, SPRING 2021. NARRATING DEBT (Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow)
DUKE UNIVERSITY
