Space, Place, and Mapping
In this interdisciplinary graduate seminar we will analyze the production and interaction of visual signs (written, painted, and cartographic) issuing from distinct cultures in the ever-changing temporal, social, and geographic space of colonial Latin America. Drawing from Michel de Certeau's essay "Walking in the City" we will address how spaces are experienced or "practiced" in everyday life, and, with a nod to Henri LeFebvre's influential "The Production of Space," how the built environment is inflected by such representations and practices. We will also identify the discourses and analyze the tensions that arise when multiple cultures attempt to claim and order physical realms and the imaginary. With an emphasis on the oftentimes unequal encounters between Europeans, indigenous peoples, and Africans we will study how the cultural texts in question were both reflective and constitutive of the colonial experience. This course allows students to acquire and develop a rigorous theoretical framework and historical background for research related to colonial cultures in contact, particularly in the areas of: 1) the construction of identity in relation to interpretations and representations of self and others; 2) written and visual assertions of domination, subordination, negotiation, and appropriation; and 3) the circulation and impact of these texts in their own time, as well as the present day.
