Latin Amer-Caribbean Studies (LATC-UA)

This course introduces students to the language of Haitian Kreyòl, also called Creole, and is intended for students with little or no prior knowledge of the language. Haitian Kreyòl is spoken by Haiti’s population of nine million and by about one million Haitians in the U.S. Including over 190,000 in the New York City area. In fact, New York City has the second largest population of Kreyòl Speakers after Port--‐au--‐Prince, Haiti’s capital. Through this course, you will develop introductory speaking, reading, and writing skills. We use a communicative approach, balanced with grammatical and phonetic techniques. Classroom and textbook materials are complemented by work with film, radio, and especially music (konpa, rasin, twoubadou, rap, raga, levanjil, vodou tradisyonèl, etc.), as well as with visits to city museums and institutions related to Haiti.

A continuation of Elementary Haitian Kreyòl I, this course develops student's speaking, reading, and writing skills in Haitian Kreyòl, also called Creole. Haitian Kreyòl is spoken by Haiti's population of nine million and by about one million Haitians in the U.S. including over 190,000 in the New York City area. In fact, New York City has the second largest population of Kreyòl speakers after Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital. We use a communicative approach, balanced with grammatical and phonetic techniques. Classroom and textbook materials are complemented by work with film, radio, and music, as well as with visits to city museums and institutions related to Haiti. At the end of the course, students will be better able to conduct a conversation in Haitian Kreyòl and have a better command of Haitian vocabulary and grammar within a relevant cultural context.

As an intermediate language course, the expectation is that students will complete homework for every class session. This includes reading, writing, listening and sometimes viewing film or other media; the reading and writing exercises grow in length and complexity over the course of the semester. In the latter part of the term, students read increasingly challenging documents—news articles, essays, short stories—and write longer and more complex responses and an essay on a topic related to Haiti. Following a performance-based curriculum, the emphasis is on practicing and demonstrating real world communicative skills in written and oral form.

As an intermediate language course, the expectation is that students will complete homework for every class session. This includes reading, writing, listening and sometimes viewing film or other media; the reading and writing exercises grow in length and complexity over the course of the semester. In the latter part of the term, students read increasingly challenging documents—news articles, essays, short stories—and write longer and more complex responses and an essay on a topic related to Haiti. Following a performance-based curriculum, the emphasis is on practicing and demonstrating real world communicative skills in written and oral form.

Among the most consequential expressions of human social organization are caste and race. Each is a familiar part of the American landscape, caste construed as exotic ("Eastern") and race as homegrown ("Western"), yet both are objects of critique. The presumed differences between caste and race have drawn attention to certain forms of social inequality while discouraging understanding them beyond conventional categories that define certain geographies. Although caste and race are symbols that represent particular master narratives about country and culture, and create and project discrete images of "the other," on-the-ground distinctions between them always have been slippery, with long histories of interaction between them shaped by varying contexts. Geared for students who have had a basic course in anthropology, history, cultural studies, sociology, or diaspora, or an area studies course on the Atlantic World or South Asia, this course will engage in wide-ranging, comparative, and interdisciplinary exploration of caste and race, both as distinct categorical entities and as imbricated relations of power.

In her seminal analysis of contemporary cinema, Linda Williams introduced the term “body genres” to study melodrama, horror and porn, genres usually dismissed as low brow and that go to extremes in their representation of the body in states of distress and elation. This course deploys her insights to probe and interrogate the artistic genres that have dominated, and shaped, the cultural representation of key moments of Latin American history. Starting with the long cycle initiated by the conquest and closed with political independence (in which the dominant genres are the Epic and the War Film), we will move to a critical assessment of Revolutionary Porn, Latin Melodrama and State Horror as cultural forms that have not only spawned novels, films, paintings and performance, but also affected our understanding of complex social processes, historical conflicts and political trajectories.

4 points, lecture. First offered spring 2016, and yearly thereafter. No prerequisites. Topics vary by semester. Offers in-depth focus on an aspect of social, cultural, political, or artistic life in the Caribbean and its diasporas, emphasizing multilingual, interdisciplinary, and comparative approaches to the region as a whole.

Students will choose an option within this Asylum Practicum: Option 1 will investigate the history of archival studies through archival research and work towards a digital public history project about asylum records; Option 2 will provide further work on issues around the narratives and documentation of asylum. Knowledge of Spanish is welcome for Option 2 but not required, and students may be able to pursue work in a language of their choosing.