Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Note: Graduate students only.

This course focuses on textual and visual narratives about plants, tracing how colonial relations and institutions of power have shaped plant commodification and extractivism. We will read primary sources from the early modern period—including descriptions and drawings of plants in the Códice Florentino, and in works by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo—, as well as secondary texts on botany, botanic gardens, plant commodification, ecocriticism, and empire. We will also analyze and discuss archival sources and cultural production from the 19^th-21^st centuries, focusing on narratives about the latex-bearing tree Hevea brasiliensis and postcolonial imperial extractivism. While course material will mostly cover sources from/about Latin America, it also foregrounds the global networks of plant circulation and the planetary implications of plant commodification.

HISP-S 659     #28707      11:10A-12:25P    MW      SY 001     Prof. Olimpia Rosenthal