A Planetary Avant-Garde: Experimental Literature Networks and the Legacies of Iberian Colonialism

This Hispanic Studies graduate seminar focuses on the literary and artistic period known as the historical avant-garde (1909-1930) with a global, planetary perspective in relation to the legacies of Iberian colonialism across the world. As a historical event closely intertwined with the global expansion of Western colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization during the early twentieth century, the historical avant-garde constitutes a rich period during which various transnational connections are articulated, experienced, and imagined across the world beyond a merely European or Anglo-American framework as it relates to the impact of Iberian colonialism in different regions of the globe. While providing a theoretical introduction to avant-garde and global modernist studies, with archive of primary sources related to the field of Hispanic Studies, as well as Lusophone Studies, our course will study instances of experimental literature networks emerging during the historical avant-garde across Western Europe, East Asia, West Africa, and the Americas.The course format thus aims to combine the analysis of important critical and theoretical readings across these sub-fields, with the close reading of a series of primary readings central to global avant-garde. Through the examination of the work of authors like Almada Negreiros and Fernando Pessoa (Portugal), Tarsila do Amaral and Oswald de Andrade (Brazil), Vicente Huidobro (Chile), Jose García Villa and Angela Manalang Gloria (Philippines)-as well as theoretical readings by Laura Doyle, Gayatri Spivak, Marjorie Perloff, Peter Bürger, Dipesh Chakravarty, Bruno Latour, Caroline Levine, Benedict Anderson, and Tamar Herzog among others-this course will explore the interrelated aesthetic, linguistic, sociohistorical, and geopolitical dimensions of the emergence of a planetary avant-garde during the first three decades of the 20th century, as well as its various rearticulations in the 1960s and the contemporary period. Taught
Course Attributes:

A Planetary Avant-Garde: Experimental Literature Networks and the Legacies of Iberian Colonialism

ENGLISH LITERATURE 508A

Section 01