Themes and ideas for that class

It is exoticism, primitivism, representations and uses of the savage and the jungle, and indigenismos, and lo indígena.

I thought of giving a class on these themes again because I ran across some material on Quintín Lame, and I am thinking about the idea of Latin America, and Latin America as “entre-lugar,” and the way in which it produces itself as mestizo or hybrid.

Here is a talk on representing the Other. Here is Enrique Dussell talking about the location of Latin American culture.

There is the question of time. Time and the Other, and the idea in Los pasos perdidos that all times are mixed in Latin America. Dussell points out that the idea of the ancient, medieval and modern worlds doesn’t work anyway and is an invention of the Romantics.

There is Vasconcelos talking about the superiority of the tropics, which goes precisely with the prologue to REM.

There is the rethinking of mestizaje (note that Bolívar did not say we had to fuse, he said we were mixed and had to get along). There is race as a hybrid term. There is the current discussion, popular among students, about pinning down definitions for “Hispanic” and “Latino.”

There is Clorinda Matto, and all kinds of people who work with the other. El otro, el mismo, looking for self through other. (I am not sure yet whether or how I will do this.) I was thinking of El hablador as well.