Course Description
This course examines how the question of the "nation" in Latin America is consistently posed in relation to a set of interlinked issues, key among them being "modernity," indigenism and various attitudes towards anti-imperialism. It seeks to delineate the conditions in which visual cultures in Latin America took up particular forms of nationalism in order to gain a global historical identity. Visual representation was seen as a particularly crucial area in the battle for interpretive power during this period, as various artistic and cultural movements struggled to claim symbolic representation of modern nations fundamentally different from their former colonizers.

We will look at theories of nationalism as formative as those of Gramsci, Anderson, Hobsbawm, Gellner and Bhabha, in order to situate them vis-à-vis a Latin American context. We will move from the formative moment of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) and Mexican Muralism, through the post-1968 period in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Cuba. This will allow us to examine a variety of key responses to the issue of cultural nationalism on the part of the avant-garde, the popular sphere, the state, and political factions from extreme left to extreme right.