Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Note: Graduate students only.

Counter/Insurgency in Latin American and US Literature and Culture

Are insurgencies merely momentary acts? Do counterinsurgencies constitute exceptional periods that last as long as is needed to defeat insurgencies? The present course answers these questions in the negative, proposing instead to see in the dialectics of insurgency and counterinsurgency a motor for the accumulation of both state power and capital. Focusing on the US and Latin America, our perspective will be hemispheric, while also endeavoring at times to venture beyond. We will trace the operations of counterinsurgency, from the colonial period to the near present, as not simply a set of techniques for maintaining social order, but as something foundational and inherent to order itself. Counterinsurgency thus emerges as something that does not just develop after and in reaction to insurgency, but rather precedes, anticipates, and conditions it. Combining theoretical and historical material with analyses of literature, film, photography, and architecture, along with other media, we will delve into how counterinsurgency produces regimes of intelligibility and visibility in symbolic and material ways. Our inquiry will be guided by questions such as: How can we approach counterinsurgency as cultural form? How might we relate it to the value-form and to the epochally of capitalism? And, relatedly, what is the political, epistemological, and cultural status of insurgency if its function is to interrupt or dislocate constituted order? Despite the limited temporality and often sporadic nature of insurgencies, what connections might we find among them across different times and places?  Whether the course is taught in Spanish or English will depend on student enrollment. Students from outside the Department of Spanish and Portuguese are encouraged to enroll.

HISP-S 688     #28615      5:30P-8:00P    R      ED 3004     Prof. Andrés Guzmán