51��������

This course will focus on teaching methods. While applicable to college, they’ll mostly be of the K-12 variety. Proleptically, it should always already recognize the false dichotomy rather too neatly encapsulated in its subtitle.

In terms of public action, Ganas remains a community-driven, cross-cultural association that offers students volunteer opportunities to engage with the predominantly undocumented Latine migrant worker population. We maintain relationships with local organizations and members while developing new ones, along with more conventional classes and readings. Over the past couple of years, it has ballooned into a range of simultaneous activities that are seemingly happening all of the time, with students very much at the center of said impetus.

From Simón Bolívar’s recruitment of the exiled Francisco de Miranda in early nineteenth-century London, to the counter-revolutionary Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres, written in a Hampstead flat, much of Latin America’s postcolonial identity has been forged outside its borders. Beyond defining home, exiles have defined their alternate environments. De Miranda’s statue still stands in Fitzroy Square, and Cabrera Infante lived in London for the rest of his life.

Students with little or no Spanish will learn the language through an immersion in Latin American painting. While there will be some discussion of standard tactics such as stylistic nuances and artists’ biographies, it is expected that we will rapidly develop sufficient linguistic ability to focus on movements, ranging from the republican art of nation-building in the 19th century to modernism, magical realism, and the postmodern, thus treating the works as ideologemes, representations of political and social import.

In lieu of more conventional advanced Spanish classes, paralleling a series of often disparate tutorials, with tutees working in relative isolation, the proposal is to allow students free reign over an idea for a final, term-long project, while concurrently offering them an educated, exoteric audience to assist in fleshing out their work. Faculty will provide key secondary and tertiary reading, common to all, some with immediate relevance to the projects in question, some deemed necessary for any culminating work, but the primary content of these sessions will be student-driven.