SPN 415 - What Remains: Waste in Latin American Cinema, Literature, Media, and Art

Course Units: 1.0

(TBD: Staff) This course examines the presence and impact of trash, disposed objects and life, and landfills/wastelands in the context of expiry, renewal, and globalization in Latin America. Borrowing from philosophy and urban sociology and anthropology, Latin American, cultural, media and cinema, and environmental studies, the course teases out the aesthetic, political, and economic aspects of “trash” as an intricate stockpile of modern, industrial, digital, and postindustrial traces of discarded and remnant history as well as a multifaceted symbolic index with particular trajectories and manifestations in Latin America contexts. The course will revisit cultish films like Amores Perros (Gonzalez Inarritu, 2000) and lesser known films like La sociedad del semaforo (Mendoza, 2010) and Buscando a Miguel (Fisher, 2006); examine Photography work by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Miguel Río Branco, and Enrique Meinitides and conceptual art by Teresa Margolles and Doris Salcedo, among others; explore documentary and environmental work looking at waste, neoliberalism, and recovered and precarious life such as Sequia (Sanchez Macias, 2009), Cartoneros (Livon-Grosman, 2006),Lixo extraordinario (Walker, Jardim, Harly 2010), El tren blanco (Garcia, Perez Gimenez y Garcia, 2003), and Yasuni: dos segundos de vida (Leonardo Wild, 2010); and finally, analyze select literary and alternative initiatives related to “basura” (Ibargoyen, Bolanos, Restrepo, editorial Eloisa Cartonera, Spregelburd, among others). Prerequisite(s): Take two SPN 300 level courses. CC: LCCS, HUM