Courses
One of the central goals of the Institute is to create new knowledge and to inform new ways of thinking about knowledge. The Institute hosts team-taught seminars that combine the face-to-face quality of traditional classrooms with online collaboration, enabling students throughout the Americas to communicate and work together online. The areas of research developed by the Institute for these courses follow a chronological and thematic sequence, exploring shared topics in the historical trajectory of the Americas in the last five centuries: Conquest, Colonialism, Nationalism and Globalization. The Institute has offered related courses in Trauma, Memory and Performance; Performance and Activism; Latin American Theater and Performance; Performance and/of Indigeneity; and Theories of Spectatorship, among others. We also offer an annual summer course in Lima, taught by major scholars in the field, and co-taught by Peru’s foremost theatre collective, Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, which is open to students from member universities. Students can take the course for credit as an Independent Study at their home institution.
Summer 2013: Art and Resistance
This course explores the many ways in which artists and activists use art (performance, mural paintings, graffi ti, writing, music) to make a social intervention in the Americas. We begin the course by examining several theories about art and activism (Brecht, Boal, Buenaventura, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Foucault among others) and then focus on issues of agency, space, event, and spectatorship in relation to major political movements (revolution, dictatorship, democracy, globalization, and human rights) as seen in the work of major practitioners. Jesusa Rodríguez will lead an intensive one-week performance workshop as part of the course. Performances, video screenings, guest lectures, and visits to FOMMA, Chiapas Media Project, a Zapatista community and other activist projects will provide an additional dimension to the questions raised by the theoretical readings and discussions. Students are encouraged to develop their own sites of investigation and present their work as a final presentation and paper.
Fall 2012: Dark Sites
This course explores the interconnections between trauma, memory, and performance in the Americas by looking at the dark sites and traces left by criminal politics. Instead of starting with the events themselves—the detentions, torture, and disappearances—we look at the spaces in which they have taken place and the paradigms for thinking about criminal politics and remembrance.
Fall 2012: Theories of Spectatorship
This course explores the many ways in which theorists and theatre practitioners have thought about the ways in which staged action (whether in film, theatre, or politics) pacifies, activates, interpolates, and manipulates viewers. We will explore concepts such as identification, voyeurism, narcissism, bearing witness, percepticide, spect-actor, and others.
Spring 2012: Embodiment
This course will consider a number of topics related to embodiment and performance. Has the rise of digital technologies changed the ways in which we think of the body and presence? Has embodiment come to complicate or disrupt paradigms of race, class, gender and sexuality? Focusing on embodiment in virtual and actual spaces, we will explore such issues as simulation, affect, trauma, memory, re-performance, activism, and resistance.
Spring 2012: Memory, Trauma, and Performance
This course explores the interconnections between trauma, memory, and performance in Latin America. Starting in the 1960s, we focus on events throughout the Americas—Mexico 1968, Argentina’s ‘Dirty War,’ Chile under Pinochet, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru, and other sites in which criminal politics have disappeared citizens and traumatized populations. Does each context have its own unique structure and idiom, or can we think about individual and collective trauma through a translocal, cosmopolitan lens? Topics include: the performance of state power and state sponsored terror; the individual and collective nature of trauma; the study of embodied practices such as testimony and witnessing; the construction of archives of testimony; testimony, its use in literature, museums, and pedagogy, its dramatizations by others, its archivization; the social role of sites of memory (ESMA, Villa Grimaldi etc.); performances of protest and resistance.
Spring 2012: Performance and Revolution
The purpose of this class is to explore a number of topics in Performance and Revolution. It won't be exhaustive by any means, but we'll touch on a number of questions via articles, theoretical and historical texts, and lectures, with the goal of understanding revolution and the role of performance within it, with a special focus on what's going on right now in New York City.