CSP 59 The Latin American Jungle in Western Imagination

In this course we will look at the jungle as a space where western civilization's desires and fears come into tension with the imagined "other" so that sometimes the jungle can be beautiful and desirable, like the Garden of Eden, and other times savage and dark, like hell. Readings will include chronicles of the Spanish conquest, Latin American works of fiction, excerpts from anthropological and botanical texts, narco traffic narratives as well as environmental discourse and film, in order to explore the particular relations of power that intersect in each narrative.