Debating Cultures: Latin American Soundscapes

This course explores Latin America through its sound cultures from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. Diving into aural, literary, and scientific archives, we will discuss how sound produces meaning beyond visual and written cultures, articulates experience, and mobilizes political and cultural change. We will study sound, beats, speech, music, and noise through various cultural objects and media (novels, poems, essays, anthropological studies, journalism, films, radio, records, and digital cultures). We will contextualize these objects in the region's political, economic, racial, and gender historicities. We will examine the interplay of national identity, popular culture, aurality, and modernity in a variety of case studies: folklore (national and American folkloric missions), indigenista operas, indigenous radio and shamanism, the Latin American new song movement (the 1960s and 1970s), rock and youth cultures, cumbia, reggaeton, avant-garde and slam poetry, and the noises of Latin American megacities and protests. This course will have a strong, mandatory and graded oral communications component, and it is taught in Spanish. Prior or concurrent enrollment in Spanish 303 is required. Students who have taken more than two Spanish culture or literature classes are not allowed in this course and must proceed to a Researching Cultures class.
Course Attributes: EN H; BU IS; AS HUM; AS LCD; AS LS; FA HUM; AR HUM; AS SC

Debating Cultures: Latin American Soundscapes

SPANISH 3212

Section 01